Archive - 2012

Yesterday, Thursday, November 29, 2012, I posted the American Writers Museum list of literary works that their readers said world leaders should read to gain a better understanding of America?” Okay, today it is our turn! I ask this question! What Peace Corps book gives our  U.S. Leaders a better understanding of the world where we lived and worked as Peace Corps Volunteers? Send in your book(s) selection and comment why this writer ‘gets it right’ and why our political ‘eaders should buy a copy so that they will know what is really happening in the developing world. Thanks.

American Writers Museum Reveals List of Literary Works Named by Writers and Readers as Providing a Better Understanding of America The Great Gatsby, Leaves of Grass, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Sun Also Rises Top List “Which works by American writers should world leaders read to help them gain a better understanding of America?” That is the question posed last May to 38 contemporary American writers and the reading public in the first online exhibition of the future American Writers Museum®. The exhibit, Power of the Word: Leaders, Readers and Writers, was curated to dovetail with the U.S. hosting this year of the G8 and NATO Summits, as well as the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. According to Malcolm O’Hagan, chairman of the American Writers Museum Foundation, many readers and writers chose books that grapple with the challenges of American life. Author . . .

EDITOR’S NOTE: From the book description of The Marble Room:  “At 27 years of age, Bill Hatcher was at crossroads. Brought up in an evangelical household in the Bible Belt, his religion had provided no answers to his parents’ broken marriage, or, indeed, his own divorce. The key to his salvation would come from a most unlikely source: a Peace Corps flyer! A year later, Hatcher was in Tanzania as a geography teacher at an all-girls’ boarding school. It was here that he “challenged” himself by engaging in dangerous ascents on Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and Mount Meru, and through tragedy and triumph, questioned the core of his being and he managed to escape the confines of his “marble room” and gain a new understanding of himself and God.” This memoir is the story one PCV’s self-discovery and proof that, as he says, “even the most naïve and insular American can . . .

Lost and Found in Macedonia: A Journey to Unexpected Places By Marilyn Wheeler (Macedonia 2004-06) 187 pages Park Place Publications $15.95 August 2012 Reviewed by Barbara E. Joe, (Honduras 2000-03) Lost and Found in Macedonia is the only recent Peace Corps narrative I know of, beyond my own, describing the experiences of a “mature” volunteer.  Although older volunteers may not be starry-eyed idealists, they are still beckoned by the unknown, which provides both the thrills and frustrations of Peace Corps service. The adventure of joining is precisely not knowing quite what to expect, finding surprises at every turn, with no two experiences being alike.  Like volunteers of any age, author Marilyn Wheeler found strength in her own resourcefulness in confronting new challenges.  Since I often talk Peace Corps with over-50 audiences, I’m delighted to have another book to recommend. Many parallels emerge between myself and the author.  Inspired originally by . . .

RPCV writers keep writing and keep finding our site. We just heard from John Mundahl a former PCV and now a Crisis Corps Volunteer in Romania. Here’s a short bio on John and his books, most of which are published by the small and wonderful Monkfish Publishing. John Mundahl is a retired ESL teacher.  He taught for 32 years kindergarten-university at various places in the United States and throughout the world.  He has been a yoga teacher and practitioner for 30 years and was a resident at the original Kripalu Yoga Ashram in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania during Swami Kripalu’s four-year stay from 1977-1981.  He is also an Ayurvedic Health Care Educator and the author of nine books.  He served in Venezuela (1967-69) and joined the Peace Corps again in 2012 as a Peace Corps Response volunteer assigned to the Ministry of Education in Bucharest, Romania.  He can be reached at:  johnmundahl@yahoo.com.” . . .

The Incurables by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991–93) University of Notre Dame Press $20.00 233 pages 2012 Reviewed by Susi Wyss (Central African Republic 1990-92) As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s, I once accidentally ingested a triple dose of Fasigyn to treat a case of giardia. That night, my mind slipped into an alternate world in which I hallucinated that rats were coming through my window and trying to crawl under my mosquito net. That experience instilled in me an enduring empathy for people struggling with mental illness, and taught me just how thin the membrane is that separates sanity from madness. In Mark Brazaitis’ fifth book, a deep and introspective collection of stories called The Incurables, this membrane seems especially thin and permeable, and his varied cast of characters manifests symptoms of varying degrees of madness. A school coach turns into a . . .