Archive - August 18, 2014

On October 7, Christopher R. Hill (Cameroon 1974–76) will publish Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy (Simon & Schuster), a memoir of his years with the State Department. To quote the S&S website: Hill was on the front lines in the Balkans at the breakup of Yugoslavia. He takes us from one-on-one meetings with the dictator Milosevic, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the Dayton conference, where a truce was brokered. Hill draws upon lessons learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon early on in his career and details his prodigious experience as a US ambassador. He was the first American Ambassador to Macedonia; Ambassador to Poland, where he also served in the depth of the cold war; Ambassador to South Korea and chief disarmament negotiator in North Korea; and Hillary Clinton’s hand-picked Ambassador to Iraq. The book can be preorder now at Amazon.com. Outpost: Life on the . . .

Dancing with Gogos is the story of one man’s effort to make a difference in a collection of Zulu villages in rural South Africa, while fulfilling a life-long dream of serving in the United States Peace Corps. It’s the story of learning a new language, of immersing oneself in a different culture, of leaving a love 15,000 kilometers behind and discovering the unexpected chance to find a new one half a world away. It’s the story of South Africa’s history of apartheid and the effects of that sorry legacy on tens of millions of black Africans who to this day struggle to leave behind 500 years of oppression. • Gary Cornelius was nearly 55 when he realized that he was weeks away from being the age at which Oregon public employees could retire early and get a modest pension, so the month he turned 55 he retired  — after a . . .

Long Ago And Far Away by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64) A Peace Corps Writers Book 342 pages July 2014 $18.00 (paperback); $9.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Kathleen Croskran (Ethiopia 1965–67) Long Ago and Far Away by John Coyne, an ambitious novel spanning time and place, connects the disparate worlds of Parker Bishop, a former CIA agent who retreated to safety and anonymity as a proprietor of a second hand book store in Westchester County, New York — thus masking his undercover past with respectability that included a beloved wife and two daughters. Bishop’s wife Sara has just died of cancer when the great love of his youth, the beautiful Irish McCann, reappears unexpectedly, first in the form of her travel guide to Ethiopia, and eventually in person. Irish also has cancer, but is not dying, not yet, not until she — and Parker Bishop — confront their murky history and forty-year-old . . .