Archive - May 2012

1
Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) Tells Us How To Promote Ebooks On-Line
2
Soutine and Dr. Maisler
3
Review of Philip Bralich’s Blaming Japhy Rider
4
Allen Mondell (Sierra Leone 1963-65) New Documentary Film Focuses on Third Goal of The Peace Corps
5
Review of Kevin Lowther's The African American Odyssey of John Kizell
6
The Golf Wisdom of Lighthorse Harry Cooper, Part II
7
The Golf Wisdom of Lighthorse Harry Cooper, Part I
8
Lawrence F. Lihosit tells you how to publish
9
Review — Larry Lihosit’s Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir
10
Petri in the Peace Corps–Class of '62 at Harvard
11
Montezuma Country RPCVs Remember Their Tours
12
NYTIMES Reviews Theroux's The Lower River
13
How To Sell Your Self-Published Book in Brick & Mortar Bookstores
14
George Packer (Togo 1982-83) on Kennedy, Obama, and L.B.J.
15
Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) Plays Criminal Suspect at Oxford

Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) Tells Us How To Promote Ebooks On-Line

[Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) had an article this week in GalleyCat site on website where you can –for free–promote your ebook.] Jason Writes: Are you struggling to promote your self-published digital book? Thanks to the Kindle Boards, we discovered a long list of places where self-published authors can promote their eBook for free. We’ve collected more information about the sites in a simple directory below, linking to the submission pages for these eBook sites. If you are an avid eBook reader, these sites are great for finding new books to read as well…. Free Sites for eBook Promotion Addicted to eBooks: “This website is perfect for readers like me, who want to watch their book budget. This website also allows the author to rate some of the content of their book. I want to know before I buy if a book the level of profanity, violence or sex in a . . .

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Soutine and Dr. Maisler

Stan Meisler writes about his story “Soutine and Dr. Maisler”: Hona Maisler, my father’s brother, was a Parisian doctor who was murdered in Auschwitz during World War II. Chaim Soutine, the painter, was a very distant relative, through marriage. He died in France during the war. Both lived in France from the turn of the century. I thought it would be interesting to imagine the two knowing each other in Paris during the 1930s when France was regarded as the most powerful country in the world. To do so, I used the device of a memoir, putting myself into Paris at that time as well. But I actually was a little child in the Bronx then and never met either of the two men. When I sent this around to a few literary magazines, I labeled it carefully as “a short story, not a memoir.” But I guess I wasn’t . . .

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Review of Philip Bralich’s Blaming Japhy Rider

Blaming Japhy Rider: Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who Survived by Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. (Togo 1978) Balboa Press $17.99 (paperback); $35.95 (hardcover) 248 pages 2012 Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65)   PHILIP BRALICH HAS WRITTEN A BRAVE BOOK. His memoir, Blaming Japhy Rider, depicts the unsettling tale of his struggle to recover from a tragedy that occurred during his Peace Corps service. In 1978 in their first year in Togo, West Africa, he and his wife, newly married before entering the Peace Corps, set off for home in Lama Kara on their motor scooter after a party with other Volunteers. He was driving, with her riding on the back, along a rutted dirt lane when they were hit by an oncoming car sending them flying off the road into a dried river bed. He heard her calling for help but he couldn’t move or even turn over to . . .

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Allen Mondell (Sierra Leone 1963-65) New Documentary Film Focuses on Third Goal of The Peace Corps

[Allen Mondell (Sierra Leone 1963-65) was a teacher overseas and is today a documentary film maker living in Texas who has since 1995 been planning to make a film about the Peace Corps. It has taken him 15 years but he never gave up on the idea and now he has his documentary film Waging Peace. It took him 27 months, or as he says, “a second tour” to tell our story. Allen has weaved together letters, journals, emails and blogs written by RPCVs into a film that profiles four Peace Corps Volunteers who are today still trying to make a difference by fulfilling the Third Goal. As he told me, “I wanted the people who watch this to know first that the Peace Corps still exists and that Volunteers are still serving around the world. I also wanted viewers to know that for a great many Volunteers those two . . .

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Review of Kevin Lowther's The African American Odyssey of John Kizell

The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland by Kevin G. Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963–65) The University of South Carolina Press $39.95 (hardcover) Kindle & Nook $15. 326 pages May 2011 Reviewed by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04) JOHN KIZELL LIVED A LIFE THAT could easily read as fiction. Born in West Africa in about 1760, he was falsely accused of witchcraft in his home village in order to dispose of him as a slave. He survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic (one in five of his fellow captives perished) and was purchased in Charleston, South Carolina, on the eve of the American Revolution. During the war, he took up arms as a loyalist, believing this the best path to freedom. In payment, he and a number of other black loyalists were evacuated by the British . . .

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The Golf Wisdom of Lighthorse Harry Cooper, Part II

[In talking with Harry Cooper on those long ago sunny afternoons, the conversation shifted to the early days of the tour, and what golf was like in the Twenties, and Harry began to recall players that time, as well as the changes in the game.] II When I first started to play down in Texas, we had to put together our set of clubs. In fact, I was the second-to-last professional to shift from wood to steel shafts. Max Smith, I know, was the very last. At the time–and this would be in the Twenties–one had to put together a ‘set’ of clubs, for there were no two clubs that were just alike. It wasn’t until the early Thirties when they developed a system of golf club uniformity. Before then you might have ten mashie-niblicks and not two of them had the same loft. So we put together the best set of clubs . . .

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The Golf Wisdom of Lighthorse Harry Cooper, Part I

[Back in 1990 I wrote a book about golf’s senior tour entitled Playing With The Pros: Golf Tips From The Senior Tour. It was published by E.P. Dutton. The book was basically tips on how to play from some of the greats of the game, plus recollections from those professionals. For an introduction, I went to see my friend Harry Cooper, then 89, and still teaching at Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, and asked him about the game of golf. Over a period of several long afternoon conversations at the club and at his home nearby, I wrote down Harry’s words of wisdom, his stories of the early tour in America, his golf tips and stories, and then I wrote them up for the Introduction. Here is some of what Harry had to say, in case you play golf, or you are just interested in reading what one . . .

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Lawrence F. Lihosit tells you how to publish

Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) author of Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir recently gave a talk on how to self-publish your Peace Corps story at a local California library. Here is what he had to say. • To paraphrase Mark Twain, I’ve been a writer for half my life and a jack ass my entire life. What I’ve learned is that we all have important stories to share and maybe it was when we reach down to lift our own child or maybe our grandchild that we are inspired. You may flinch at the idea of writing a book. Don’t. First of all, many famous American writers did not even graduate from a university. Second, do you have any idea how many silly books are published each year? Your story is worth 1,000 diet books and 10,000 romance novels. Third, it is not as difficult as it . . .

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Review — Larry Lihosit’s Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir

Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) !Universe $23.95;Trade $13.95;Kindle $3.03 127 pages 2012 Review by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) As Jane Albritton (India 1967-69) writes in her Foreword to Lawrence Lihosit’s Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir, “This book is no idle gift, but a gift-wrapped challenge.” Albritton should know, as Series Editor of the daunting, but brilliantly successful Peace Corps at 50 project. The point of Lihosit’s book is that it is vitally important to write about your Peace Corps experience, not only for your own gratification, but for posterity, because the countries we served in are changing rapidly, and a Volunteer’s experience gives great insight into far-flung places at different points in history. The history of Peace Corps is not a set of dry dates and names of Washington men in suits, but a grand parade of testimonials by . . .

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Petri in the Peace Corps–Class of '62 at Harvard

[From the Harvard Crimson, we get this piece on Tom Petri (Somalia 1965-67)] Congressman Thomas E. Petri ’62 got his first taste of the life of a politician when he was still an undergraduate living in Quincy House. His senior year, Petri was mistaken for Congressman Frank B. “Brad” Morse, who was scheduled to give a talk at the College. “Tim came down there, and they thought that he was the Congressman because Congressman Morse hadn’t shown up yet, and he played along with it,” said Bruce K. Chapman ’62, his Quincy House roommate. “Finally the real Congressman came in, and it dawned on the crowd around Tim that he was not the Congressman.” Petri, now a 17-term congressman for Wisconsin’s 6th district, remains a Wisconsinite at heart. Originally from the small town of Fond du Lac, friends and family say that Petri remains distinctly un-Washingtonian. “Most people don’t swim . . .

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Montezuma Country RPCVs Remember Their Tours

The Cortez Journal Peace Time Montezuma County residents recall their experiences as former Peace Corps volunteers Former volunteers tell stories By Michael Maresh Journal Staff Writer Stories from local residents who formerly served as Peace Corps volunteers follow: BILL SOUTHWORTH (Nigeria 1962-64) Bill Southworth joined the Peace Corps in 1962 and spent two years in Nigeria to teach a variety of different subjects there, including history, health and science, and basketball. After joining, he learned not only about the United States but also about himself. Southworth said being in another country for two years gave him a different perspective – from the eyes of another country. During his down time, he tried to get other Peace Corps volunteers to teach African history to the people since this was their history, but mentioned he was sent to Nigeria to teach English there. Southworth said he would have liked to stay, but . . .

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NYTIMES Reviews Theroux's The Lower River

The Sunday New York Times Book Review section on May 20, 2012,  has a review of Paul Theroux’s (Malawi 1963-65) novel, The Lower River. Reviewer Patrick McGrath sums up: The Lower River is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Theroux exposes the paternalism of Hock’s Peace Corps nostalgia, his “sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership.” That sense of responsibility, and Hock’s modest contribution to the welfare of a people he was once genuinely fond of, has been replaced by a harsher mode of operation, run by hardhearted contractors living apart in impregnable compounds. “I have to leave,” Hock pleads. “I’m going home.” To which the village headman replies, with chilling menace, “This is your home, father.”

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How To Sell Your Self-Published Book in Brick & Mortar Bookstores

[Our own Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) had an article yesterday in his wonderful GalleyCat site on selling in bookstores. It comes from the American Bookseller Association. I’m reprinting it here.] The American Booksellers Association has posted a very useful article explaining how self-published authors can sell their books at a few independent bookstores around the country. We’ve posted links to those helpful resources below, but you should read the whole article. If your bookstore has an option for self-published authors, share a link in the comments section-we will update our article with more resources. Watermark Books and Cafe owner Sarah Bagby explained how self-published writers can add books at her Wichita, Kansas bookstore. “No questions asked, we’ll take five copies of a book on consignment,” said Bagby. The terms are 60/40, and the store keeps the books on the shelves for 90 days. “If they sell, we’ll get back to the author . . .

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George Packer (Togo 1982-83) on Kennedy, Obama, and L.B.J.

[George Packer (Togo 1982-83) put up this item yesterday on The New Yorker website. It is really a smart piece on presidents, vice presidents, and how history repeats itself.] In one of those coincidences that get you thinking in historical analogies, President Obama announced support for same-sex marriage just a few days after the publication of Robert Caro’s fourth volume on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Passage of Power.” Obama arrived at his position in very much the way that John F. Kennedy decided to put the force of the White House behind civil rights: slowly, reluctantly, and with a big assist from his overlooked, often ridiculed Vice-President. I spent the summer of 1980 as an intern at a legal-aid office in southern Alabama, and in the houses of poor black people I got used to seeing a sign on the wall that said, “The three who set . . .

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Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) Plays Criminal Suspect at Oxford

Before Peter Hessler was awarded a “genius” grant by the MacArthur Foundation, and before he was a PCV in China (1996-98), he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Of that time, he writes in the current issue of The New Yorker, (May 21, 2012). He found part-time work standing in police lineups. At the time he was reading, as they say at Oxford, English Language and Literature, and his courses included tutorials on Middle English, Spenser, Shakespeare, the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century. At the start of the Michaelmas term, he saw a notice that the St. Aldates Police Station was looking for volunteers to stand in identity parades. They paid ten pounds per parade. So Peter went down to the station and signed up. His first parade was for stealing bikes. The station hadn’t finished constructing its viewing room, which would feature a one-way mirror. For the time being, . . .

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