Peace Corps writers

New memoir explores white saviorism and U.S. American exceptionalism in the Peace Corps   Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Cynthia Ann Caul published You Try Paa: A Love Song in Translation on October 8, 2020. The book is a Peace Corps memoir, detailing Caul’s time in Ghana in a series of episodic poems. The poems traverse a number of themes, including race, gender, and religion in relation to the Peace Corps, community and international development, and the author’s role in both. Caul’s everyday experiences raise questions about how white saviorism and U.S. American exceptionalism can be perpetuated and maintained by the Peace Corps and similar organizations, as well as how they were by the author herself during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer. The work invites a thoughtful examination of the Peace Corps and international development more broadly, as well as self-reflection among those who participate in these institutions. Caul was . . .

  What would you do with your dad’s broken time machine, a modified “spherical astrolabe?” You could fix it if you had 21st century tools, but you’re both in the 15th century. You could pretend it’s a normal nautical device and offer it to the 15th century explorer Vasco da Gama. But what if the Great Admiral discovers the true function of the device? How will you edit your dad’s memoir to describe the astrolabe as nothing more than an ancient marine navigation device? Will your dad’s wannabe time-traveling companions find the astrolabe in the future? — Around the Horn and Back • I’ve always been a voracious reader, and in junior high I published two science fiction stories in my school’s creative writing magazine. After a long hiatus, I began writing again in my junior year of college at UC Berkeley. I joined a group of acquaintances in 1969 . . .

  Learning Peace is a story about a girl from the Midwest who moves to the desert of northern Ethiopia. It’s a story about someone who realizes that there is more to life than 3G network; it’s a story about camels meandering by and people sipping coffee and silly mistakes in foreign language class. But above all, this is a story about growth, inner transformation, and resilience. It’s a story about dozens of minibus rides through the rocky desert, hundreds of cups of coffee and conversation, and the many people along the way who taught me about peace. I wrote this book in the hopes of enlightening and teaching others about my Peace Corps experience. I won’t pretend that I saved anyone or changed anyone or taught anyone anything during my time in Ethiopia; to be honest, the most growth and change and renewal that happened was within me. So . . . .

  Roland Merullo, the bestselling author of Once Night Falls, returns with a galvanizing historical novel of Nazi-occupied Naples and the rage and resistance of a people under siege. Italy, 1943. The Nazi occupation has cemented its grip on the devastated city of Naples. Giuseppe DiPietra, a curator in the National Archives, has a subversive plan to aid the Allies. If he’s discovered, forced labor or swift execution. Lucia Pastone, secretary for the Italian Fascist government, is risking her own life in secret defiance of orders. And Lucia’s father, Aldo, is a black marketeer who draws Giuseppe and Lucia into the underworld—for their protection and to help plant the seeds of resistance. Their fates are soon intertwined with those of Aldo’s devoted lover and a boy of the streets who’ll do anything to live another day. And all of Naples is about to join forces to overcome impossible odds and . . .

  There has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industry, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical organizational culture that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed. Netflix set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, . . .

  The new Peace Corps Writers’ Best Book Review Award is named in honor of Marian Haley Beil (Ethiopia 1962-64), co-founder and publisher since 1989 of the Peace Corps Writers newsletter, website, and book imprint. Following her tour of service, Marian worked for 4 years in the Office of Reports and Special Studies at Peace Corps Headquarters. She founded the Ethiopia & Eritrea RPCV group in 1991, and later co-founded Rochester RPCVs.   Our first Peace Corps Writers’ Best Book Review Award goes to Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65) who has authored three novels: Green Fires, The Climate of the Country, and My Mother’s Island, published by Curbstone Press, and currently in-print with Northwestern University Press. She is a winner of the Maria Thomas Prize for Fiction, an American Book Award, The New York Times  New and Noteworthy in Paperback, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers, among many awards.  She is on the steering . . .

  A Reasonable Doubt (2020) is the third book in the series of legal thrillers featuring defense lawyer Robin Lockwood by The New York Times bestselling American author Phillip Margolin (Liberia 1965-67). I enjoyed this book and recommend it for your reading list. Click on the links to learn more about the author and his many books. About Philip Margolin I grew up in New York City and Levittown, New York. In 1965, I graduated from The American University in Washington, D.C. with a Bachelor’s Degree in Government. From 1965 to 1967, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, West Africa. In 1970, I graduated from New York University School of Law. I went at night during my last two years in law school, and worked my way through by teaching junior high school in the South Bronx in New York City. My first job after law school was a clerkship with Herbert M. . . .

George Packer (Togo 1982-83) Staff writer for The Atlantic   Here is a prediction about the November election: If Donald Trump wins, in a trustworthy vote, what’s happening this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, will be one reason. Maybe the reason. And yet Joe Biden has it in his power to spare the country a second Trump term. Events are unfolding with the inevitable logic of a nightmare. A white police officer shoots a Black man as he’s leaning into a car with his three sons inside — shoots him point-blank in the back, seven times, “as if he didn’t matter,” the victim’s father later says. If George Floyd was crushed to death by depraved indifference, Jacob Blake is the object of an attempted execution. Somehow, he survives — but his body is shattered, paralyzed from the waist down, maybe for life. Kenosha explodes in rage, the same rage that’s been igniting around the . . .

  Europe By Bus: 50 Bus Trips and City Visits Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994-96) 371 pages SK Journeys Publisher May 2019 $16.00 (paperback)   Reviewed by Craig Storti (Morocco (1970-72) Europe by bus? Really? Does anyone travel by bus who doesn’t have to? Aren’t buses for commuters? OK, tour buses, for sure. But Steve Kaffen is not talking about tour buses; he’s talking about buses as in the way go to from one city to another—all across Europe, for heaven’s sake! Who would do that when you can take a nice, comfortable train? I was skeptical. Can you tell? But then I’m an American, and intercity bus travel is not nearly as common in the US; we have cars for that sort of thing. But one of the revelations in Kaffen’s book is how well-developed intercity bus travel is in Europe, within the same country and from one country to . . .

  Rowland Scherman was the first photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961, documenting the work of Volunteers all over the world. His photos helped define the image of the agency we know today. He became a freelance photographer in 1963. His photographs have appeared in Life, Look, National Geographic, Time, Paris Match, and Playboy among many others.     Altamont 1969 Bill  Owens (Jamaica 1964–66), photographer Damiani Publisher May 2019 $26.99 (Hardcover)     On April 15th of 2019, The New York Times published he following article about Bill and photographing at Altamont: “50 Years After Altamont: The End of the 1960s.”   50 Years After Altamont: The End of the 1960s A reluctant rock concert attendee, Bill Owens nevertheless photographed the disastrous 1969 music festival Altamont and the close of an era. A half-century ago, 1969 capped a radical, idealistic decade that saw the rise of the hippie generation and the . . .

  THE MARIA THOMAS FICTION AWARD, first presented in 1990, is named after the novelist Roberta Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73) whose pen name was Maria Thomas. Roberta lost her life in August 1989, while working in Ethiopia for a relief agency. She went down in the plane crash that also killed her husband, Thomas Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73), and Congressman Mickey Leland of Texas. Mrs. Worrick’s novel, Antonia Saw the Oryx First, published by SoHo Press  . . . in 1987, drew critical praise for its depiction of the tensions between colonial whites and Africans on a continent buffeted by changes. After the success of the novel, Soho Press issued Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage, Mrs. Worrick’s collection of short stories in which she told of the difficulties of various people — Peace Corps Volunteers, foreign academics, Indians, American blacks and white hunters left behind by colonial empires — in finding . . .