Author - Marian Haley Beil

In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China by Michael Meyer (China 1995–97) Bloomsbury Press February 2015 384 pages Pre-order: $28.00 (Hardcover), $9.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by William Siegel (Ethiopia 1962-64) I’ve had an interest in literature about China since I discovered a volume of translated Chinese poems on my parent’s bookshelves. The book, a handsome hardbound edition in bright orange linen, had a picture on the front of a lone figure in flowing robes standing on a boat poling across a swift river. Inside was a poem by Li Po titled “The River Merchant’s Wife.” In the poem, as a nine or ten year old, I first found that words could evoke feelings such as the notion of longing. Michael Meyer’s absorbing second book about China (his first, The Last Days of Old Beijing, is one I’m looking forward to reading), brings us a fresh, inside . . .

Dancing with Gogos: A Peace Corps Memoir By Gary P. Cornelius Peace Corps Writers 280 pages 2014 $13.00 (paperback) Reviewed by Jack Allison (Malawi 1966-69) • Gary Cornelius has written an inviting Peace Corps memoir in minute detail, interspersed with cogent quotes and anecdotes, including entries from his blog posts. This is a fresh and refreshing saga, for Cornelius served from 2012 to 2013, and the book was published in 2014. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease which resulted in his early departure from South Africa with one year remaining on his term of service. Because this issue was introduced early on in the book, it created tension about what he would accomplish in one year after in-country training. Cornelius had wanted to join the Peace Corps for 40 years prior, even after two rejections due to pre-existing medical issues. He was also an older Volunteer — he was . . .

Rush of Shadows (Historical Fiction) by Catherine Bell (Brazil 1966–68) Washington Writers Publishing House October 2014 384 pages $17.95 (paperback) • Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy (Peace Corps Memoir) by Christopher R. Hill (Cameroon 1974–76) Simon & Schuster October 2014 448 pages $30.00 (hardcover), $12.74 (Kindle) • Love & Ordinary Creatures (Novel) by Gwyn Hyman Rubio (Costa Rica 1971–73) Ashland Creek Press 306 pages October 2014 $17.95 (paperback) • Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories by Paul Theroux (Malawi Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 368 pages September 2014 $27.00 (hardcover), $14.85 (Kindle) • A Man Named Jay: the true story of a boy who died and the man who lived (Children) by Damian Wampler (Kyrgyzstan) CreateSpace 70 pages January 2014 •

On October 6th, Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65) was featured on Lorrie Bodger’s site TheBookUnderHerBed.com discussing her first steps to becoming an award winning author. Among Marnie’ awards is the 1995 Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Fiction Award for her Peace Corps novel, Green Fires. • Guest post: A writer learns to write by Lorrie Bodger Marnie Mueller is the award-winning author of three novels: Green Fires, The Climate of the Country, and My Mother’s Island. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the early 1960s, a community organizer in El Barrio in NYC, and then a member of Mayor Lindsay’s administration, responsible for programming cultural events in all five boroughs. She left city government to become Development Director and later Program Director of WBAI-FM radio; after WBAI she ran her own business producing citywide events, concerts, benefits, and weddings. Today she’s a full-time writer (and MacDowell Colony Fellow), . . .

At Home on the Kazakh Steppe: A Peace Corps Memoir by Janet Givens (Kazakhstan 2004–06) Ant Press, August 2014; Birch Tree Book, 2015 208 pages $14.99 (paperback), $4.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) • At 55, Janet Givens and her husband, Woody, join the Peace Corps and go to Kazakhstan. Woody had been a Professor of Speech Pathology at Temple University, and Janet was a Certified Gestalt Psychotherapist. Leaving their comfortable life, their children, their grandchildren and their beloved dog was heartbreaking, but they met the challenge wholeheartedly. Their first months with their host family brought the predictable culture shock, with emotional tensions that nearly shattered their marriage. While Woody expected respect in his university teaching position, as an expert in his field, Janet wanted the grass roots Peace Corps experience, without cell phones or lap tops, learning how to teach young people English in a baffling . . .

John Coyne writes: The New Yorker for October 13, 2014 has a great piece by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) entitled, “Tales Of The Trash: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt.” It’s Peter’s Letter From Cairo. Peter writes, “Waste collectors like Sayyid Ahmed, known as zabaleen, work in an informal economy, but they provide a remarkable efficient recycling service and become experts on their neighborhood.” The article is available online at: NewYorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/tales-trash

Letters from Yemen (Peace Corps letters) by Mary Lou Currier (Yemen 1991–94) CreateSpace 158 pages June 2014 $21.00 (paperback) Reviewed by Darcy M. Meijer (Gabon 1982–84) • The older I get, the more I appreciate straightforward writing. And the more I travel, the more I understand the world. I have just finished reading Mary Lou Currier’s Letters from Yemen, a collection of 158 color photographs and letters written home during her Peace Corps service as a TEFL teacher from 1991 to 1994. I chose this book to review because I currently live in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The Republic of Yemen is my neighbor to the south, with only the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia between us. Yemen also borders Oman and has coasts on the Red and Arabian Seas. Due to the uneasy situation in Yemen now, I doubt I will visit it, but I . . .

Chile Preserved When the Whistling Stopped (novel) by David J. Mather (Chile 1968–70) Peace Corps Writers 274 pages June 2014 $12.95 (paperback), $6.95 (Kindle) Reviewed by Richard M. Grimsrud (India 1965-67) • David Mather’s imaginative eco-thriller When the Whistling Stopped follows RPCV Tom Young back to his old Peace-Corps station outside Valdivia in southern Chile after three decades of dreaming about his mostly idyllic tour of duty there. Many of his old friends joyously welcome him back, but there is still a big hole in his heart for Maria Elena, the love of his life who was killed in a tragic accident just before they were to be married in a ramada on the beautiful plot of land Tom had bought for his retirement. But upon his return, Tom is saddened by more than his departed enamorada. The reforestation he had worked on as a Volunteer has come back to . . .

Rush of Shadows (historical fiction) by Catherine Bell (Brazil 1966–68) Washington Writers Publishing House October 2014 384 pages $17.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Reilly Ridgell (Micronesia 1971–73) • Here’s Catherine Bell’s first sentence of her novel, Rush of Shadows: It was a beautiful country, though I hated and feared it, coming over the mountains with the wagon staggering on a gimpy wheel, black crags towering over the track, the sky blue and thick as a flatiron, and the vultures turning and turning on the hot wind, waiting for somebody to die. Wow. Now here was some finely crafted prose worthy to open a novel. Was the whole book to be this way? Well it was, and much of the many themes woven together in this story of the settling of northern California can be discerned in that first sentence. Especially the vultures. And as I read through the book I was . . .

My Turn Reflections of a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone by Betsy Small Campbell (Sierra Leone 1984–87) For the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor Friday, October 3, 2014 (Published in print: Friday, October 3, 2014) (This is Part One in a two-part series. Look for the conclusion in tomorrow’s Forum.) . NO ONE WHO LIVED through the well-documented “blood diamond war” in Sierra Leone has forgotten the terrifying sound of an approaching automatic weapon. Still today, the loud noises of thunder, fireworks, a honking horn can cause panic. Millions of people in this mountainous West African country have fought to put the nightmare of 11 years of bloody civil chaos behind them. The conflict has been over for more than a decade, but the harrowing scars of war are everywhere. There are thousands of amputees, and the elders who should have been around to guide the next generation are . . .

The October “Peace Corps Update” email announced the winners of the Peace Corps’ second-annual “Blog It Home” competition. Blogs by more than 350 PCVs were submitted, and the winners were chosen via Facebook voting. In September the 9 winning “Top Bloggers,” authors of 8 blogs were invited to Washington and participated in a Third Goal spree during which they spoke at the White House, in schools for under-served students, to Girl Scouts and on the Voice of America. Visit the each of the winning blogs and read about how these PCVs are living the life! From Albania, Jill Conway’s “Holy Shqip Xhilli is in Albania” From Cameroon,  Anna Nathanson’s  “Anna Does Pangea“ From China, Keith and Heather May’s  Sponge and Slate From the Dominican Republic, Bronwen Raff’s  “Bea, Vea, Bella: Mensajes from a PCV in the Dominican Republic” From Guinea, Sara Laskowksi’s  “Sara in Peace Corps Guinea: 27 Months of Service . . .

To purchase any of these books from Amazon.com, click on the book cover, the bold book title, or the publishing format you would like — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that will help support our annual writers awards. • Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War (A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series) by Sharon Alane Abramowitz (Cote d’Ivoire 2000–2002) University of Pennsylvania Press July 2014 280 pages $65.00 (hardback) • I Know How to Hola For children starting language-immersion school. (English and Spanish Edition) by Susanne Aspley (Thailand 1989–91), illustrated by Lucas Richards Self-published 2012 $14.99 (hardcover) • I Know How to Nî Hâo For children starting language-immersion school. (English and Chinese Edition) by Susanne Aspley (Thailand 1989–91), illustrated by Lucas Richards Self-published 2013 36 pages $14.99 (hardcover) • Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small . . .

Breathe: A Memoir of Motherhood, Grief and Family Conflict by Kelly Kittel (Jamaica 1985–87) She Writes Press May 2014 369 pages $18.95 (paperback), $7.69 (Kindle) Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976–78) Shortly before I received Kelly Kittel’s wrenching memoir in the mail, I read a piece in The New Yorker about the poet Edward Hirsch, whose book length elegy to his son, dead at 24 of an overdose, has just been published. Hirsch says he didn’t want to write that book. He was mired in mourning and obsessed with the circumstances of his son’s life and death. But ultimately, the writing won out. ” . . . You become resigned,” he says. “Your job is to write about the life you actually have.” In a prologue to her book, Kittel offers a similar insight. She describes her childhood love affair with books and her lifelong hope of becoming a writer. What she . . .

In July, the University of Pennsylvania Press  published Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War by Sharon Alane Abramowitz (Cote d’Ivoire, 2000-2002), who teaches anthropology and African studies at the University of Florida. Searching for Normal . . . “explores the human experience of the massive apparatus of trauma-healing and psychosocial interventions during the first five years of postwar reconstruction. Sharon Alane Abramowitz draws on extensive fieldwork among the government officials, humanitarian leaders, and an often-overlooked population of Liberian NGO employees to examine the structure and impact of the mental health care interventions, in particular the ways they were promised to work with peacekeeping and reconstruction, and how the reach and effectiveness of these promises can be measured. From this courageous ethnography emerges a geography of trauma and the ways it shapes the lives of those who give and receive care in postwar Liberia.” For more about the . . .