Archive - April 23, 2015

Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse by Stanley Meisler (PC Staff 1964-67) Palgrave MacMillan 202 pages 2015 $26.00 Reviewed by Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64) • Full disclosure: Stan Meisler is one of the Peace Corps figures I have liked and admired most.  As a clueless upstart in the old Peace Corps Program Evaluation Division starting in 1964, I was lucky enough to have had Stan as a co-evaluator on three excursions out to where the real Peace Corps was stumbling along.  (A significant subset of people at Washington headquarters thought of the far-flung Volunteers as unglamorous supernumeraries, a kind of mud-stained boys’ and girls’ auxiliary, and the truest soul of the Peace Corps was to be found after work at Chez Francois next door on Connecticut Avenue). Stan and I went once to India together and twice to Ethiopia — both plenty real — to try to figure out how . . .