Archive - November 2011

The Lima Bear Stories Thomas Weck (Ethiopia 1965–67) and Peter Weck Illustrated by Len DiSalvo $15.95 (hardcover) • The Megasaurus 40 pages May 2011 • How Back-Back Got His Name 32 pages July 2011 • The Cave Monster 32 pages September 2011 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) THOMAS AND PETER WECK, along with illustrator Len DiSalvo, have created a series of children’s books for 4–8 year olds called The Lima Bear Stories, three of which, The Megasaurus, How Back-Back Got His Name, and The Cave Monster, I have had the pleasure of reading to my two and three-year-olds over the past week. The stories, about a kingdom of lima bean-sized bears and a number of regular-sized animal friends of the bears, are based on stories Thomas told his children. The books are handsome and beautifully illustrated, and knowing what my children would do to the books . . .

Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders is a live one-hour weekday global cultural affairs program with a focus on the future. It is broadcast from Wisconsin Public Radio and hosted by Jean Feraca. Its mission is described on the website (http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/aboutus.cfm). Yesterday’s broadcast focused on Peace Corps writers  Sarah Erdman (Cote d’Ivoire 1998-2000), author of Nine Hills to Nambonkaha,  and Peter Hessler (China  1996-98), who wrote River Town and two other books on China. To listen to the program, go to:http://wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_111115k.cfm This program is an hour long and several RPCVs ‘call in’  so the discussion goes beyond books to the Peace Corps experience, and what has happened to all of us! It is terrific show. Sarah and Peter did a great job talking about their books and their tours. In true Peace Corps spirit, Sarah calls in to the program from Brussels where she is at the moment,  and Peter was on his cell phone from downtown . . .

Thirty years ago P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) published a novel entitled Eddie and the Cruisers about a New Jersey rock band. The book was turned into a cult movie. (Kluge also wrote the WSJ article(s) that were the basis of  the movie Dog Day Afternoon.) Cruisers was (is) a terrific book, published by Viking in 1980. Now comes another ‘rock band’ novel by an RPCV! This one is the first novel by  Tyler McMahon (El Salvador 1999-02) who served in Palo Grande, in the Rosario de Mora municipality, and who is now an Assistant Professor at Hawaii Pacific University. His novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, was published in October by St. Martin’s Press. The story is about Laura Loss who comes of age in the hardcore punk scene of the 1980s, the jailbait bassist in her brother Anthony’s band. Now, a decade after tragedy destroyed Anthony and their iconic group, she finds herself serving coffee in Seattle. While on a reluctant . . .

Ashley Hardaway (Ukraine 2006–08) has never been able to sit still. It progressively got worse. Far away universities. Backpacking trips. Solo vacations. It wasn’t any big shock when she announced she was joining the Peace Corps – leaving for Ukraine a month after graduating from college. Afterwards, upon moving back to America, Ashley would continuously find herself saying “In Ukraine this one time…” To everyone’s great delight and/or horror she got a publishing deal for a travel guide to Ukraine — Ukraine: Discover the Real Ukraine. Traveling around the county again and writing about it would either rid her of all her thoughts regarding this country, or provide her with even more stories to torment people with at Christmas time. So far, all signs point to the latter. Ashley Hardaway now lives in Florida where she continues to write – about other things besides Ukraine. However, for our site, she wrote a piece on . . .

Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey by Leslie Noyes Mass (Pakistan 1962–64) Rowman and Littlefield Publishers $32.95 212 pages (paperback) 2011 Reviewed by  David Day (Kenya 1965–66; India 1967–68) IN THIS ACCOUNT of her initial Peace Corps assignment in rural western Pakistan from 1962 to 1964, and a return visit forty-seven years later, in 2009, Leslie Mass gives us tightly-focused access to the lives of women and a range of attempts to educate them in arguably one of the world’s most dangerous countries. It’s a glimpse not often seen in terrorism-haunted media coverage of this troublesome, strategically important Muslim nation. As part of her titular “journey,” we are taken — with the aid of numerous excerpts from letters written to George (a close friend and later, husband), and verbatim transcripts from tape recordings of conversations — from the dusty alleys of small villages to the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram . . .

[Another RPCV, Ed Gruberg, wrote me about Alan Weiss and his thoughts of Alan as a person and a writer.] I always expected Weiss to become a famous writer. How could he not be? He was smart and witty and was a great storyteller. He had a fine ear and he relished pointing out other people’s flaws. He worked very hard, wrote hours every day. All he had to do was get it down on paper. In his short life he published very little: one novel; one extended soliloquy to Ibadan that I published in Voyeur, a small magazine I ran; and one scholarly mathematical article on totitives, co-authored with a Yoruba colleague, Victor Olunloyo that was published twice – in an American mathematics journal and a British mathematics journal. He left unfinished a novel about Nigeria as it unraveled in the sixties. A piece about Malcolm X’s speech at the . . .

Robert Cohen (Nigeria 1962-64) was an Associate Peace Corps Director in Liberia from 1965 to 1967, and is today an educational consultant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and cabaret singer. He has also been on the board of Friends of Nigeria. In 1963, he was Alan’s roommate in Nigeria. As his roommate in Africa, what do you remember most about Alan in Nigeria? His “wedding,” a rag-tag affair that took place at a Yoruba Magistrates Court, in midday, all of us suited and tied for the occasion and sweating mightily as we all awaited our group’s turn before the magistrate. This was one event that Alan could NOT simply OBSERVE. He was the main character, along with fiancee Judith, and unaccustomed to that role, despite his writing. Also, I remember the going-away party Weiss and Judith held for at least a dozen of us. Weiss sat at the end of a long banquet table . . .

Page 255: The sick circus of training behind us, we would go to Africa. But we couldn’t have been more disaffected, more fragmented into our basic globules of personality; and if wave after wave of new Volunteers followed us over there, and gave us the big hello, we would certainly hello in return – but tied to that fellow as participants in a great movement to revolutionize the quality of American life, well, don’t be silly. Each of us would fall in love with Africa, bits and pieces of that bedeviled continent, and make friends, small friendships in our own way, one or two, a handful, except JZ, who would make hundreds, thousands, who would conquer a town, riding maverick over the laterite roads on her blue Honda, this blonde giant of a white girl, crazy and loving and finally at peace, momentarily at peace, in a great sprawl of . . .

Page 235-237: I don’t recall a blare of trumpets and a silver leaping flash of mercury, but there might as well have been. He wasn’t there. And suddenly he was. Moving effortlessly, like a gleaming thoroughbred trotting into the winners’ circle. You got the feeling he always moved like that: like a fighter waltzing across a ring, or an Olympian surging victory-foamed out of a pool, a dancing golden boy, the world’s greatest . . . The roar rose as if the cement were splitting under our feet, it rose in stages, in tiers, until it shook the rafters, till it fluttered Palmer’s necktie, a leaping frenzy of noise, as people roared and whimpered and climbed high on the backs of chairs to shout their inspiring gratitude. It was everything: the end of a long summer, the heat, the bursting tension, the wait, the golden boy appearance, that dance, smile, aristocratic wave, . . .

Pages 31-33: There followed a briefing by the Peace Corps Field Assessment Officer, a psychiatrist. Now in sections, we met in a reverberatingly hot classroom of Teachers College. The psychiatrist was a ruffle-haired, soft-cheeked young guy, trying to – suck! suck! – get his pipe lit. Off to one side, half sitting against the desk, was presumable a colleague, a haggard-looking creature with a large balding dome of a head and jutting elbows. The spitting image of Raskolnikov. “We’re meeting today,” said the psychiatrist, “to tell you what to expect in the way of selection procedures. It would be disingenuous of us to pretend that you won’t be observed and assessed throughout training. Most of you will be judged acceptable and sent to Nigeria, but a small percentage will be disqualified. Why disqualified? I will come to that. It shouldn’t surprise you that we want emotionally mature, competent individuals who . . .

Page 2: These were momentous times, Pope John died and the only clergyman with the guts to stare a television camera in the face was the old croaker himself, Cardinal Cushing, who eulogized from the heart. Gordon Cooper was lofted into orbit, as I watched with my heart thumping against my ribs, but the public taste for that kind of thing had become so staled that nobody else give a flicker of a damn. The Governor of Alabama stood like a minstrel dandy in the schoolhouse door, while Katzenbach, with immeasurable dignity, supplicated before him. Kennedy took Europe by storm and I felt a twinge of egret that I wasn’t still in Paris to witness it. In Berlin he delivered his most rousing speech, declaring with hoarse passion, “Lass sie nach Berlin kommen!” – and in turning away as the newsreels clearly showed, slipped himself a small smile for the . . .