Author - John Coyne

  Tree Bernstein served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cambodia (2015-17). She taught writing and literature at the Brooks Photography Institute for over a decade. Before serving in the Peace Corps she was the area coordinator for California Poets in the Schools and poetry coach for Poetry Out Loud. Bernstein holds a MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. Her book of short stories, The Last Tourist in Bali, was published by Baksun Books in 2020. Her memoir Mistranslations is about her journey as a 65-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English and Art in a rural Cambodian village for two years. Her work has also been anthologized in Thus Spake the Corpse—An Exquisite Corpse Reader, Black Sparrow Press; Low Down & Coming On! Poems About Pigs, Red Dragonfly Press; If Bees Are Few—a Hive of Bee Poems, University of Minnesota Press; Askew Poetry Journal, and other journals and . . .

  Eyes to See Africa: From the Verandahs of Sierra Leone by Judith Kinney Thiele (Sierra Leone 1985-87) Self Published February 2024 471 pages $4.99 (Kindle); $23.00 (Paperback)   Kinney’s dark room echoes a monk’s spare cell. Mosquito net. Metal cot. Two suitcases. A two-year vow of near-poverty. Outside on the road, chickens chase giant bugs. Goats weave through the foot-traffic as people balance baskets, bundles, and buckets on their heads. It will get better. She’ll figure it out. Taking a break from her Silicon Valley desk job gives service to a needy world and brings her middle-aged self back to basics. A new community center seeks her health and rural development skills, introducing her to the people of the chiefdom. She meets kindness and acceptance amid the complicated “how-do” of days lived without electricity or clean water. Unfamiliar noises, food, and taboos shape her new life. From landing to . . .

Before He Was George Orwell, He Was Eric Blair, Police Officer   Paul Theroux’s (Malawi 1963-65) new novel, “Burma Sahib,” explores the writer’s formative experiences in colonial Myanmar. Reviewer William Boys writes in Sunday’s New York Times, “The late Martin Amis once declared that “novelists tend to go off at 70. … The talent dies before the body.” Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre. The talent is in remarkable shape.”

Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. He published a Commentary this weekend in The New York Times entitled “The Isolationism Antidote” calling on young people to “Study Spanish in Bolivia. Or teach English in South Korea. Or volunteer in Nepal.” Never Once Does He Mention The Peace Corps! Where have you been Nicholas? What do you think we have been doing since 1961? We’re older than you! Read It And Weep The Isolationism Antidote By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist Feb. 10, 2024 Why has the isolationist wing of Congress been blocking aid to Ukraine and become, in effect, a tool for President Vladimir Putin of Russia? Republican politics explain . . .

Burma Sahib: A Novel by Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) Mariner Books February 2024 400 pages $14.99 (Kindle); $30.00 (Hardback);  1 Credit (Audio book)   “Paul Theroux has exploited this biographical lacuna with great shrewdness and gusto… his fictional account of Blair’s life there [Burma] is a valid and entirely credible attempt to add flesh to the skeletal facts we have of this time. […]this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre.” —New York Times Book Review From the acclaimed author of The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers comes a riveting new novel exploring one of English literature’s most beloved and controversial figures—George Orwell—and the early years as an officer in colonial Burma that transformed him from Eric Blair, the British Raj policeman, into Orwell the anticolonial writer. At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other . . .