Author - John Coyne

I came across on the web an hour long talk by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) at Politics & Prose Book Store in Washington, D.C. It was originally broadcast on C-Span. In this hour presentation, Peter talks about his Peace Corps years and his second book, published in 2006, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. This title is derived from an archaeological site in China where the earliest form of writing was found inscribed on shells and bones. Peter also reads letters from his Chinese students who migrated from the countryside to the rapidly growing cities and talks about what it was like to teach in China. Peter was with the third group of PCVs to the country. After his tour Peter worked for the New York Times in China and now is a writer for the New Yorker. His Peace Corps book was called River Town. If you have time, (and you . . .

When I first came back from the Peace Corps and was living and working (and writing) in New York, I invited a young book editor out for dinner and she said to me, “I’ll go to dinner with you, John, but I won’t read your Peace Corps novel.” Well, we have been married thirty plus years now and she still hasn’t read my Peace Corps novel! It has always been difficult to find anyone who will read a book about the Peace Corps as many of you know from having finished your own book. When I first started to track “Peace Corps writers,” and publish with Marian Haley Beil Peace Corps Writers & Readers, I thought the publishing world had had enough Peace Corps first-person-experiences and I am as surprised as anyone that there continues to be published every year very important and well written accounts of life in the developing world written by RPCVs. We have had about . . .

Jack Allison served a 3-year tour with the Peace Corps in Malawi, Central Africa, where he was a public health Volunteer in the bush.  He is best known as a singer/songwriter there, having recorded arguably the most popular song with a message in Malawi — Ufa wa Mtedza (Peanut Flour in Your Child’s Corn Mush).  After Peace Corps, Jack went to medical school, and recently retired after a 30-year career in academic emergency medicine.  He has done three public health stints in Africa — a USAID mission in Tanzania in ’82, a Project Hope Mission in Malawi in ’94, and US State Department mission in Malawi in ’05 — the latter two involved helping to eradicate AIDS in that Central African country.  Since 1967 Allison has raised more than $150,00.00 with his music, and he and his wife, Sue Wilson, have donated these monies to various charitable causes.  (For more . . .

Jeffrey Tayler (Morocco 1988-90; PC Staff/Poland 1992, Uzbekistan 1992-93) book Murderers in Mausoleums was picked as one of the best books of 2009 by Travel Channel’s Worldhum.com.

Bob Hoover, book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has just picked the Best Books of  2009. On the short (10 books only) non-fiction list is Soul of A People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America” by David A. Taylor (Mauritania 1983–85).  Quoting Hoover in his selection, “This 1930s version of a stimulus package reinvigorated a starving artist class in America with jobs for out-of-work writers. The results, while uneven, were remarkable. Taylor provides a basic history of this project.”   Nicely done, David! Read our review of the book at: https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/rpcv-taylors/  

The Sun–a very fine small magazine published by Sy Safransky in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that you should read (and could write for) just published (January 2010) a short piece by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97)  in their Sunbeams column, which is the back page of the publication. Sunbeams are short items that shed light on a particular topic. Bissell has a comment on the Environment. Tom writes: Environmentalism suddenly struck me as the most obvious philosophy imaginable: Let us not ruin forever where we live and work and breathe and eat. Earth’s future inhabitants will no doubt look upon our current environmental practices–maintained despite all manner of evidence that doing so will result in  planetary ruin–roughly the way we look upon eighteenth-century surgery. And that is if we, and they, are very lucky.” Tom is now teaching creative writing at Portland State (if you are looking for a writing class to take) and you . . .

Reviewer Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, for Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University. She worked with Roma (Gypsies) for fifteen years, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal at the age of fifty-five, then went on to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti for five years. She retired in Florida in 2002. She has written a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert, and is working on a memoir of Haiti. • What the Abenaki Say About Dogs, and other poems and stories of Lake Champlain by Dan Close (Ethiopia 1964–66) 53 pages Tamarac Press $10.00 2009 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) Dan Close met a group of Abenaki Indians sifting through a yellow loader filled with sand, looking for their ancestors’ bones. Someone was building a “new house by the river” and the Abenaki . . .

Reviewer Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing (fiction, poetry, personal essay, freshman comp) at the University of Michigan – Flint. Her Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, was a top-ten finalist in literary fiction in the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year awards. Her most recent publication, “Ordinary Dirt,” was part of a Driftwood Review special issue featuring poems of exactly 100 words.  Her work in multiple genres has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press, and many literary magazines.  She commutes between Flint and Los Angeles with her husband, Ted, who’s also an RPCV (Turkey 1964–66). She took time out to review Larry Kimport’s novel At the Table of Want that was published in October. Here’s what she had to say. At the Table of Want by Larry Kimport (Malaysia 1980-82) October, 2009 338 pages $16.97 Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976–78) Like Larry . . .

Bryant Wieneke is an assistant dean at a California university and has self published several novels. The latest, The Mission Priority, is the third in that series. A fourth will soon be published and a fifth is now being written. “It became a vehicle,” says Wieneke. “The two main characters have opposite foreign policy objectives.”  This latest book is reviewed by the intellectual tag-team of Lawrence Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) and his son, Ezequiel. The first in this series by Wieneke, Priority One, was reviewed in 2005 on Peace Corps  Writers by David Gurr (Ethiopia 1962–64). • The Mission Priority by Bryant Wieneke Peace Rose Publishing 2009 335 pages $10.00 Reviewed by Lawrence  (Honduras 1975–77) and Ezequiel Lihosit Do you miss the Bush era colored coded paranoia? I sure do. That was even better than building fallout shelters during the 1960’s. I only wish they had introduced some kind of anti-terrorist uniform with cool patches, maybe a . . .

Martha Cooper (Thailand 1963-65) taught English in Thailand before journeying by motorcycle from Bangkok to London, where she earned a degree in ethnology from Oxford. Then she settled down in New York and went to work as a staff photographer for the New York Post. It was during this time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that she began to shoot some of the most famous photographs in the world. She spent several years photographing elevated subway lines from empty lots the rooftops of buildings in a crime ridden South Bronx, capturing New York City’s state of urban decay.  She was also able to gain the confidence of some of the most respected artists of this inner city community, such as DONDI, DURO, and LADY PINK. Assuming great risk, Cooper accompanied artists to train yards and lay-ups capturing many significant moments in aerosol art history. Taking these photos, Martha and Henry Chalfant assembled, Subway Art, a book . . .