Archive - April 2022

On Mission By Eric Madeen (Gabon 1981-83)   What follows is a reconstruction of memories, which can be likened to partially developed film … at times hazy, at others gaining clarity like images in a developing tray … of one’s mind. My mind. It was first being readied for what lay ahead by intensive French instruction for six weeks, followed by six more during work on rural school construction in Peace Corps/Gabon. With two years of Spanish at university as basecamp, French came easily; classes were named not by level, but by towns in Gabon. It didn’t take me long, however, to learn that mine, Ndende, was at a lower proficiency level. Recent graduates from Ivy League schools to esteemed public ones, we numbered approximately 60 trainees in the programs of TEFL, Fisheries, Agriculture and Construction. We were lodged in a student dormitory whose Turkish shitters went down one by . . .

  Exiled from her home in Eastern Poland as a baby, the author chronicles the aggression against Polish citizens, Jewish and Christian, by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. For many it will be the first time hearing about the deportation of thousands to the Soviet Union for forced labor, a topic they have not met in school or in the media.  Nor do they know about plans to replace Christianity and all religion with deification of Hitler and the Nazi party. The author weaves this type of information into true accounts of survival from 20 eyewitnesses whom she interviewed over the course of 10 years. Surviving Genocide: Personal Recollections expands our knowledge of World War II, that of the attempted genocide against Slavic Christians of Eastern Europe. Most books about surviving the war describe the struggles of one person or family.  This book is different in that the people the author interviewed faced diverse and generally . . .

  1917 — St. Petersburg has been renamed Petrograd. There are riots and breadlines, the rumblings of revolution. The secret police, the Cheka, and Red Guards roam the streets. Somerset Maugham and Lloyd Osbourne have been tasked with locating the Great Orlov, a stolen Imperial jewel — its value could fund the war effort against Germany. The Provisional Government President Alexander Kerensky has drawn them into an assassination plot. Maugham and Osbourne, in their roles as secret agents, encounter a remarkable number of characters. including Jack Reed the socialist reporter, the young poet Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist Hugh Walpole, a precocious Ayn Rand, the assassin Boris Savinkov and Thomas Masaryk the future president of Czechoslovakia. The pointe shoes of Anna Pavlova have appeared in a pawn shop. Maugham and Osbourne must negotiate a world of spies and double agents in order to take down the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who has ordered . . .

  Eddie Morales finds his lowly R&D life completely upended when his Boise-based biotech firm dispatches him to Puerto Malogrado, a tiny but tumultuous country in South America where the international media is accusing their experimental potatoes of causing a bizarre medical crisis.  Eddie unwillingly arrives in South America only to find his plans for a quick resolution thwarted when he gets caught between the two sides of an impending revolution, each hoping to capitalize on the potato scandal in order to seize power. Eddie stumbles into a conspiracy that reveals just how far his company will go to advance its potato empire. He is forced to make a choice: what—and who—will he sacrifice to preserve his own future in this brave new world of biotechnology? Darkly funny and compassionately rendered, One Potato charts the crooked line between nature and technology and takes a deep look into a future shaped by disasters . . .

  The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia — a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age. Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall. In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and silversmiths, trade schools and space races. Over time, Franklin’s wager was . . .