Archive - February 16, 2015

Michael Meyer talks about his new book, In Manchuria: A Village called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, with Ian Frazier. Meyer’s account of the time he spent living and teaching school in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, in China’s rural Northeast, weaves together history, politics, and personal lives in a vivid drama of loss and change. Michael Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction after publishing his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship.  His stories have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on This American Life. He worked on In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China while in residence at the Cullman Center in 2010-2011. A staff writer for The New . . .

In December Nick Duncan (Uganda 2010–12) published his Peace Corps memoir Tales from A Muzungu with Peace Corps Writers. Here Nick talks about his Peace Corps service and his Peace Corps memoir. • Where did you live and work in-country? I lived and worked in Iganga, Uganda, which is in eastern Uganda. It is a transport hub for travelers and truck drivers coming and going from northeastern Uganda and Kenya to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in the south-central part of the country. To be more specific, I lived and worked in Nabirye, Iganga, which is about a 5-minute ride from Iganga Town. . What was your Peace Corp project assignment? I was an economic development Volunteer tasked with helping The Hunger Project in a variety of ways. The Hunger Project is a non-profit organization head-quartered in New York that is  committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. . . . .

Beginning in 2006 USBBY has selected an honor list of international books for young people. The United States Board of Book for Young People (USBBY) Outstanding International Books List is published each year in the February issue of School Library Journal. The Outstanding International Books (OIB) committee is charged with selecting international books that are deemed most outstanding of those published during the calendar year. For the purposes of this honor list, the term “international book” is used to describe a book published or distributed in the United States that originated or was first published in a country other than the U.S. Lost Girl Found written by Leah Bassoff and Laura DeLuca (Kenya 1987-89) won for Grades 6-8. In a review written by Anne Waliaula, from the University of Wisconsin, and published in the African Access Review on November 26, 2014, the reviewer wrote in part about this novel: The . . .