Peace Corps writers

  In his new book, Mark Walker reflects on his fifty years of travel miscalculations and disasters and how and why he travels changed over the years, as has who he traveled with. As a young Peace Corps Volunteer with no overseas travel experience, the world was his oyster, and he figured he could go anywhere if he set his mind to it—with little or no money. Then he married a Guatemalan lady and had to think more about “our” needs; then, three children meant additional requirements and responsibilities. And later, as a professional fundraiser, he would set up donor visits to program areas where the organizations he represented needed funds, which meant considering the needs of up to fifteen individuals of all ages, including children and some donors in their 70s and 80s. He’s become a savvier trekker, although he was still prone to the occasional snafu. This book . . .

Cole was born in Oregon and raised in London, Hong Kong, and India. She graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Zoology. She has spent time working in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic (1990-92) in environmental education, as a dive guide in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, and as a naturalist guide in Baja, Mexico. She has written over 30 children’s natural history books, and travels with her husband Brandon, who is a wildlife photographer specializing in marine life. It is from these amazing encounters that she derives much of her inspiration for her vividly colored, heavily textured and patterned paintings and mosaic sculptures. Drawing from her background in science, Cole creates vibrant examinations and celebrations of nature with glittering accents of glass and other mixed media. Melissa writes . . . Over the last fifteen years I’ve been delighted to discover that with the most . . .

  Virginia and Joe Thorndike have been married for twenty-two years, and now she’s in love with a surgeon thirteen years her junior. She leaves her husband and flies to Miami to start living with Rich Villamano, but there he tells her he has changed his mind and they must go their own ways. In an instant their four-year affair is over. She takes off in his car, heading north with no luggage, no hope or destination. She buys a bottle of gin and drinks it straight. Afraid that she’ll kill herself or someone else on the road, she abandons the car, flies to New York and takes an airport hotel room. She has no home and nowhere to go. In this biographical novel, much is remembered and much imagined. Flashbacks from Virginia’s youth expose the sexual abuse by her father, an affair with her high school diving coach, and her marriage . . .

  Modern History Press is proud to announce that its title I Miss the Rain in Africa: Peace Corps as a Third Act by Nancy Daniel Wesson (Uganda 2011-13) has become a Nautilus Award Winner. I Miss the Rain in Africa won the 2022 Silver Nautilus Award in the category of World-Cultures’ Transformational Growth & Development. The category, which falls in the general readership division, includes books that offer insightful perspectives on possible futures and how Humanity embraces its next steps. Published in May 2021, Wesson’s book gives an autobiographical account of the author’s service and life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in post-war Northern Uganda. Her journey spans living in a radically different culture and environment and then returning home to reconcile a life that no longer “fits.” While the book took about a year to complete and was written in full by the fall of 2020, the pandemic delayed the release a . . .

  Tokyo-ing! is an apt title for this trio of tales that chime with anyone even slightly interested in Asia’s most dynamic metropolis and its glazing of layers – be they cultural, sexual … or taking-wing exuberant. “About Face” — An American professor is trophy hunted by a wily student who then boasts of her conquest, sparking a full-blown scandal. Brought to heel in tradition, he fights for his dignity. “Sobering Love” — A Japanese career woman is obligated to join after-work drinking sessions with her colleagues, leading to alcohol addiction and deteriorating health. There seems to be no way out, until she meets Frank, a high-octane executive … “Fire Horse” — A disillusioned expat musters the courage to break out of an unhappy marriage, then searches for love on Tokyo’s electrifying singles circuit. Can he beat the odds and find a soulmate born under the right star? Eric Madeen (Gabon . . .

Democracy in Africa is Like a Flashlight without Batteries by Mark G. Wentling (Togo 1970-73) May 2022 Promoting democracy has been a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy for decades. This has been true for the dozen U.S. missions in which I have served in Africa over the past half century. Unfortunately, my experiences have left me doubtful about the results achieved by the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. has invested to promote democracy in Africa. I arrived in 1970 as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, West Africa. In my village, I learned that you obeyed the chief’s decisions no matter how illogical they might be. I also learned that it was considered impolite to criticize any of the chief’s decisions. Today it is still best to obey the chief, although he is now influenced by the central government. The overriding concern of the chief and his representative . . .

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 . . .