Literary Type

  Weekend Book Quiz Who wrote the books with the first sentences listed below, and that are based on their Peace Corps Experience, Travel, and Living the Life of an RPCV? • #1. They took us in the Land Rover, Mike and me, with Kim Buck driving. We had planned to leave that morning, as it was a good four hours’ drive, although it was only about sixty miles from Mbeya. #2. I got my Peace Corps application at the post office in Red Bluff, California, put it on the table in the kitchen, and walked around it for ten days without touching it, as though it were primed to detonate—as indeed it was—trying to convince myself that for a forty-eight-year-old farmer the idea of Peace Corps service was impractical and foolhardy. #3. The widow opens my door without knocking. A trail of Flying Horse-brand cigarette smoke enters behind her. . . .

  Dead Cow Road: Life on the Front Lines of an International Crisis by Mark Wentling (Honduras 1967–69, Togo 1970–73; PC Staff: Togo, Gabon, Niger 1973–77) Page Publishing March 2017 506 pages $24.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Bob Criso (Nigeria 1966-67, Somalia 1967-68) •   Dead Cow Road is an ambitious work of historical fiction told through the eyes of a Foreign Service worker assigned to Somalia during the political struggles and famine crisis in 1992. Mark Wentling combines real and fictional events with real and fictional characters to weave an engrossing and complex tale unfolding during a chaotic time in a desperate country. With over 45 years experience living and working in Africa with the Peace Corps, USAID, US Foreign Service, Care and World Vision, Wentling is well-equipped to be writing about it. He has the rare distinction of having lived or worked in all fifty-four African countries. Ray Read . . .

  I set this story, “Game in the Sun” —  one of three “Peace Corps” stories in my collection of ten short stories in this book — in Dessie, Ethiopia. At the time — and this was about 1965 —  there was an American couple running a religious mission in Dessie. I knew them slightly, and they were well known to the PCVs in the town. They were, I believe, a a nice couple and nothing like the missionaries in this story. Also, to my recollections, there were no Peace Corps couples in Dessie. — JC •  A Game in the Sun Betsy was not allowed to play croquet with her husband and the Reverend, so she sat in the shade of the trees at the top of the mound. The mound overlooked a lush African rainforest which grew thick and dense to the edges of the Mission Compound. The . . .

      Nature’s Poetry  is an engaging, though none too rigorous, informal compilation of the author’s poetry and art. Black and white illustrations appear on almost every page. The nature drawings are snapshots from the author’s sketchbooks, some dating back to his Indiana youth and others recording his experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Harar, Ethiopia in the 1960s. Eldon was Chair of the Department of Art Education and Crafts and Professor of Art Education at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. He was also editor of SchoolArts magazine for 11 years and president of the National Art Education Association. In the 1950s he taught art in Park Ridge, Illinois and later in Needham, Massachusetts. As Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s, Eldon and his wife, Adrienne, taught at a teacher training school in Harar, Ethiopia and then worked for the Teacher Education in East Africa Project in Kampala, Uganda. . . .

    Emily Arsenault’s (South Africa 2004-06) new novel is a psychological thriller about the murder of a psychologist in a quiet New England town and his former patient whose unreliable thread will keep you guessing. until the shocking end. I hear myself whispering. Not again. Not again. Why did I ever come back here? Surely because of you. Because I thought of something I’d always meant to tell you. Because you were the only one I ever really wanted to tell it to… Therapist Dr. Mark Fabian is dead—bludgeoned in his office. But that doesn’t stop former patient Nadine Raines from talking to him—in her head. Why did she come back to her hometown after so many years away? Everyone here thinks she’s crazy. And she has to admit—they might have good reason to think so. She committed a shockingly violent act when she was sixteen, and has never really . . .

  When I was growing up on a farm in Illinois all six of us kids (I was the youngest) waited for the Saturday Evening Post to arrive in Wednesday’s mail so we’d have stories to read over the weekend. After dinner, whichever of my three sisters was washing the dishes that night would prop a book up against the kitchen window so she could read as she scrubbed. Since my job was to dry, I couldn’t pull off that trick. But I loved books too, and before I learned to read, my oldest sister would read to me whatever Jane Austen or Brontē novel she had gotten from the village library. We read so many books, in fact, that soon my older siblings had gone through everything deemed “age appropriate” by the librarian, Mrs. Butterfield. So one day she refused to let my sister Eileen check out the book she’d chosen. My mother, an . . .

  Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Susan Zawalich. • Jenny Phillips, writer and award-winning filmmaker, dies at 76 by Bryan Marquard Boston Globe staff JULY 13, 2018 Mrs. Phillips sought Fidel Castro’s help in securing documents of Ernest Hemingway. In an Alabama prison, one of her several far-flung outposts of compassion and creativity, Jenny Phillips recorded her conversations with lifers and death row inmates — those discarded in “the dustbin of humanity,” she would later say. Back home in Concord, she played the tapes as she drove, letting their voices fill her car and spark her imagination. “They wanted people to know their stories so they wouldn’t be forgotten,” Mrs. Phillips, who turned those initial encounters into an award-winning documentary, recalled a few years later, in 2008. “They also wanted their stories to somehow help other people. As well as a wish to be remembered, there’s a wish to be useful.” Drawn . . .

  This summer and fall Joanna R. Luloff (Sri Lanka 1996–98) will read from her novel Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin Books, 2018) at the locations listed below . She describes the book this way: After Claire, a journalist working in Tamil Nadu, contracts encephalitis and loses much of her memory, she becomes reliant on her estranged husband and best friend to return to an understanding of herself. In 2012, she published the collection  The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka (Algonquin Books), which won the  Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Fiction Award in 2013. • Monday, July 16, 7 p.m. Harvard Book Store with Heather Abel 1256 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138 Tuesday, July 17, 7:30 p.m. Words 179 Maplewood Ave, Maplewood, NJ 07040 Wednesday, July 18, 7 p.m. RJ Julia Booksellers 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT 06443 Thursday, July 19, 7 p.m.    Savoy Bookshop 10 Canal St, Westerly, RI 02891 Wednesday, July . . .

  The godfather of contemporary travel writing tells us about the trip that made him fall in love with the world, as well as a reborn Hawaii and the influence of his son, Louis. by Alexander Bisley BBC/Travel 14 June 2018 • Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) is the godfather of contemporary travel writing, known for his transporting, first-person classics such as Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Deep South, The Tao of Travell and Dark Star Safari. “Travel in an uncertain world. . . has never seemed to me more essential, of greater importance or more enlightening.” In his new collection of travel essays, Figures in a Landscape, Theroux is once again bracingly perceptive and enticing on places and people. He is ever captivating on Africa, the continent that gave him a lifelong love of travel. Hawaii, one of his two homes ─ and where he conducts this interview from ─ is a particularly . . .

  Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, a memoir by Anne Panning (Philippines 1988-90) will be published in September 2018 • When a seemingly routine medical procedure results in her mother’s premature death, Anne Panning is left reeling. In her first full-length memoir, the celebrated essayist draws on decades of memory and experience as she pieces together the hard truths about her own past and her mother’s. We follow Panning’s winding path from rural Minnesota to the riverbanks of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and all the way back again–a stark, poignant tale of two women deeply connected, yet somehow forever apart. Dragonfly Notes is a testament to the prevailing nature of love, whether in the form of a rediscovered note, a sudden moment of unexpected recall, or sometimes, simply, the sight a dragonfly flitting past. • Anne Panning (Philippines 1988-90) is a celebrated prose writer. Her second collection, Super America (University of Georgia Press, . . .

  The Girl in the Glyphs (Peace Corps Writers, 2016) by David C. Edmonds (Chile 1963–65), and co-authored with his late wife, Maria Nieves Edmonds, is an award-winning finalist in the Multicultural Fiction category of the 2018 International Book Awards. Glyphs was also the recipient of a 2016 first place literary award from the International Latino Book Awards, first place Royal Palm Literary Award of the Florida Writers Association (FWA) and a silver (2017) from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association (FAPA). Edmonds’ prequel to Glyphs, The Heretic of Granada, about a priest on the run from the Inquisition, was just published by Southern Yellow Pine Publishers. It is available at Amazon or Barnes & Nobles. • The Girl in the Glyphs: A Novel David C. Edmonds (Chile 1963–65) and Maria Nieves Edmonds A Peace Corps Writers Book January 5, 2016 354 pages $12.99 paperback; $4.99 Kindle  

  “The Making of  Different Latitudes” is a 3:30 minute video of Mark  talking about his Peace Corps book, published by Peace Corps Writers last year. His son was the cameraman, an RPCV, Hal Rifken, directed the video, and a local t.v. producer, Donald Griffith, edited it. Watch:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZmJhe-E9rc&feature=youtu.be • Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond by Mark D. Walker (Guatemala 1971–73) Peace Corps Writers April 2017 332 pages $18.00 (paperback)    

[Not a Review} Our Woman in Havana chronicles the past several decades of U.S.-Cuba relations from the bird’s-eye view of State Department veteran and longtime Cuba hand Vicki Huddleston, our top diplomat on the ground in Havana under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. After the U.S. embassy in Havana was closed in 1961, relations between the countries ground to a halt. In 1977, the U.S. established the U.S. Interests Section to serve as a de facto embassy. Ambassador Huddleston’s spirited and compelling memoir about her time as a diplomat in Havana and beyond takes the reader through some of the most tense and dramatic years of Castro’s Cuba, from her first days going face-to-face with Fidel Castro, pressing to improve relations and allow hundreds of thousands of Americans to visit Cuba, to the present day, as she peers forward to the future of the relationship. She writes incisively about the . . .

  Peter Hessler’s essay “Morsi the Cat” appears in the May 7, 2018 issue of The New Yorker. The subtitle of the essay is “Making a home in Cario during a revolution.” Peter and his wife Leslie and their newly born twin daughters, Natasha and Ariel, spent five years living in Cairo. As new parents, daily they had to deal with and worry about raising their twins while living through a revolution. They were also confronted (as all cat owners are) with the daily antics of their household pet, Morsi, named after Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and president of Egypt.  The Hesslers had adopted the cat to rid their Cariro apartment of invading mice, living as they were in a first floor apartment in Zamalek, a neighborhood on a long, thin island in the middle of the Nile. While in Egypt, Peter wrote pieces for The . . .

  Thanks to a “heads up” from NPCA’s Worldview Magazine and Peter Deekle (Iran 1968-70) I’ve learned that writer Kristen Roupenian (Kenya 2003-05) is a Peace Corps writer. Kristen’s story “Cat Person” in The New Yorker [December 11, 2017] about online dating was the weekly magazine’s second-most-read story of 2017. Also Scout Press has paid a reported seven figures for the rights to two works by Roupenian. The first is a collection of stories, You Know You Want This that is scheduled for release in the spring of 2019. In Worldview article on the achievements of RPCVs, Peter Deekle writes that as a PCV Kristen taught public health and HIV education at an orphan’s center a few hours from the Ugandan border, then worked as a teacher’s aide and a cashier in a bookstore before earning a Master’s degree in English at Harvard. Next she devoted five years to full-time writing. Today . . .