Archive - May 8, 2017

  About Walled In, Walled Out — A Young American Woman in Iran by Mary Dana Marks (Iran 1964–66) • WHILE THE UNITED STATES leaps on and off a collision course with Iran, Americans forget we have not always been enemies. This memoir is set in 1960s Iran, when the Shah reigns, American consultants abound, the word ayatollah is rarely heard, and SAVAK, Iran’s secret police, wields uncompromising power. In the west, Persia evokes images of colorful carpets, wealthy oil sheiks, and glamorous royalty. Leaders of the 1979 Iranian Revolution are in elementary school when Mary  answers  John F. Kennedy’s call to “ask what you can do for your country” and joins the Peace Corps. The setting is Kerman, a conservative provincial capital on the stark Iranian plateau where she’s assigned to teach English to high school girls. Problems soon appear. As she struggles with the basics of everyday life, Iranians . . .

  About Spies and Deserters — A Novel of the American Revolution by Martin R. Ganzglass (Somalia 1966–68) SPIES AND DESERTERS FOLLOWS eighteen-year-old Will Stoner, a Lieutenant in General Henry Knox’s artillery regiment, and his friend, Private Adam Cooper, an African American in the Marblehead Mariners, from the bleak, disease ridden camp at Valley Forge through the cauldron of the summer heat of the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, to the bloody, vicious guerrilla war between Whig and Tory militias and irregulars in southern New Jersey. By drawing on diaries, original letters, military orders and broadsheets, Spies and Deserters creates an accurate picture of the everyday lives of ordinary soldiers, merchants and farmers, women, Whigs, Loyalists and Hessians, all caught up in the revolution. Spies and Deserters is my fourth novel about the American Revolution published by Peace Corps Writers. Like the others in the series, Cannons for the Cause, Tories and Patriots, and Blood Upon . . .