Peace Corps writers

Years On and Other Travel Essays Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) iUniverse May 2011 211 pages Paperback $18.95 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02; Madagascar 2002–03) AFTER READING LARRY LIHOSIT’S COLLECTION, Years On and Other Travel Essays, I find myself scratching my head as to why the author subtitled his book “travel essays,” for it was certainly the wrong phrase to use. While these twelve well-crafted and engaging essays — spanning some thirty years of his adventures and work in such places as Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia — do take us to many foreign locales, to label Lihosit’s experiences as”travel” would be to denigrate what he’s accomplished. Let Theroux claim the word “travel,” for that’s what he does: sips coffee on trains while scrimshawing cribbed and crotchety notes. Lihosit, on the other hand, should have used something like Essays of Reckless Immersion, Essays of Fomenting Revolution, Essays of Giving . . .

Every once in a while the Peace Corps produces a wonderful writer, and one of them is Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963-65). He is a former PC/HQ staffer, newspaper editor, and student of the agency who has written on African issues for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor;  he is also the coauthor of Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps,Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, published in 1978. I first met Kevin through the Volunteer in-country newsletter he edited while a PCV in Sierra Leone. I believe the newsletter was called The Tilley Lamp, and it would arrive (for some unknown reason!) in the Peace Corps Office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was well written, informative, funny, and the best PCV newsletter produced during those early years of the agency. Now he has a new book The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland.  (Kevin . . .

Peace Corps Training, 1968 By Jerr Boschee (India 1968-70) January, 2011 . . . I’m listening to a series of Donovan songs from my iTunes archive and it’s carrying me back to my room in an Indian village long ago. I had a three-inch reel-to-reel tape of his music that I played over and over again on a clunky, battery-operated, table-top recorder, along with a dozen or so other tapes I’d inherited from a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d finished his term of service long before. The quality wasn’t great, but the music sure was: Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Charles, Mamas & Papas, Peter Paul & Mary . . . and of course The Doors. June, 1968 . . . A cluster of huts and small buildings in a campground in Temescal Canyon, nothing but craggy hillsides between the compound and the . . .

Smuggled By Christina Shea (Hungary 1990–92) Grove/Atlantic, Inc., Black Cat July 2011 256 Pages $14.00 Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65) CHRISTINA SHEA’S SMUGGLED IS a tale of the emotionally corrosive power of dictatorial societies. It is also the story of human resiliency in the face of repressive governmental policies. Christina Shea has done an estimable job of illustrating this dichotomy in her second novel, an austere political saga covering fifty years of political upheaval in Eastern Europe, more specifically, Hungary and Romania between 1943 and 1991, spanning World War Two, the Stalinist takeover, and the eventual collapse of Communism. In limpid, unadorned prose, Shea, follows Jewish Éva Farkas from the age of five when she is smuggled out of Hungary in a flour sack, over the border into Romania where she is renamed Anca Balaj, and begins her transformation under the protective identity of “Romanian internal refugee” in the . . .

Once a week or so I get a book in the mail sent by an RPCV. Usually I know the book is coming, or there is a letter inside the package, saying, “hi, I’ve written a book about my time in….” Yesterday, however, I got an oversize (9×12) beautiful book of text and photos entitled Colombia: Pictures & Stories from someone named Sandy Fisher (Colombia 1962-64). No explanation. No note. No nothin’ as my son use to say when he was six. Plus, it was autographed! Well, someone had scribbled “Sandy Fisher” on the title page, no date, no comment, no nothin’. (You’ve got to love Peace Corps Writers. They are surely not into self-promotion.) This “Sandy,” as I said, was a PCV in Colombia from 1962-64, first doing community development work in Tenjo, outside of Bogota. After one year there, he went to be a volunteer leader on the Caribbean . . .

Changing Places 07/21/2011 16:05 By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER  ‘It is said that in America, the money is in the pockets of the Jews and the brains are in the heads of the Chinese,’ a local official in Guizhou province tells Michael Levy, a Peace Corps volunteer. Before long, the man adds, America will fade away and China “will have one hundred years of glory. When the Jews begin to immigrate here, we will know we have won!” Levy nods, rests his head on a table, and falls asleep. It is not his first – nor will it be his last – awkward conversation about Jews, Judaism and the United States. In Kosher Chinese, Levy, who currently teaches at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, recounts his experiences in 2005 and 2006 teaching English as a second language at Gui Da University in rural China. Up-close-and-personal, funny and, alas, occasionally . . .

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson (Uganda 1993–95) Basic Books $25.99 336 pages 2011 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) THOR HANSON, A CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST, has written a scientific treatise on a subject that most of us never notice — feathers.  But you don’t have to be an ornithologist to consider reading this book, you just have to be curious. Bird watching is not always “for the birds.” Hanson writes that it is “. . . a dangerous trap, because the true wonder of birding lies in the watching, soaking up the fine details of plumage, behavior and habit. Even common birds do uncommon things, and every sighting is worth more than a glance and a tick on a checklist.” You might see something like “Snowy Sheathbills striding about, bent forward like tiny professors lost in thought.” The scope of this book would be daunting . . .

Gather The Fruit One By One 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories: Volume Two, Americas Edited by Pat (Paraguay 1970–72) and Bernie (India 1967–69) Alter Series editor Jane Albritton (India 1967–69) June 2011 315 pages $18.95 • Tarnished Ivory Reflections on Peace Corps and Beyond Peter Bourque (Ivory Coast 1973–75) Xlibris $19.99 223 pages June 2011 • From the San Joaquin review (Short stories) Barry Kitterman (Belize 1976–78) SMU Press $23.95 264 pages June 2011 • Footprints in the Mud (review) A Peace Corps Volunteer’s 40+ Years of Ties to Thailand Michael R. MacLeod (Thailand 1964-68) Third Place Books 296 pages 2010 • Friends at the Bar A Quaker View of Law, Conflict Resolution, and Legal Reform Nancy Black Sagafi-nejad (Iran 1965-68) State University of New York Press $75.00, paperback $24.95 272 pages February 2011 • Against the Odds Insights from One District’s Small School Reform Martin Tombari (Ethiopia 1974–75) . . .

It is time to nominate your favorite Peace Corps book published in 2010.  Send your nomination(s) to John Coyne at: jpcoyne@cnr.edu. You may nominate your own book; books written by friends; books written by total strangers. The books can be about the Peace Corps or on any topic. The books must have been published in 2010. The awards will be announced in time for the 50th Anniversary. Thank you for nominating your favorite book written by a PCV, RPCV or Peace Corps Staff. A framed certificate and money are given to the winners. Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award First given in 1990, the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award was named to honor Paul Cowan, a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Ecuador. Cowan wrote The Making of An Un-American about his experiences as a Volunteer in Latin America in the sixties. A longtime activist and political writer for The Village Voice, Cowan died of . . .

Souled Out: A Memoir of War and Inner Peace by Michael S. Orban (Gabon 1976–78) Minuteman Press $17.00 230 pages 2011 Reviewed by Susan O’Neill (Venezuela 1973–74) MICHAEL ORBAN WAS 20 when the US government sent him to Viet Nam as a foot soldier in a politically-motivated undeclared war. He was a Catholic boy from Wisconsin, a thoughtful child who dreamed of traveling to exotic places.  The concept of being killed by the residents of those places — or of killing them to escape that fate — had not been part of his National Geographic scenario. The story of what happened next — of the traumatic return from the trauma of war; of depression, substance abuse, divorce — is familiar to those who have read the writings of former warriors like Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried) and Robert Mason (Chickenhawk). But Orban’s tale takes an interesting departure from those . . .

  Christina Shea Christina Shea: Smuggled Author Event In the new novel Smuggled, a sweeping story that encompasses post-WWII Romania and Budapest in the 1990s, Christina Shea takes an intimate look at the human toll of political oppression. Monday July 18, 2011 7:00 PM 82nd & Broadway 2289 Broadway, New York, NY 10024, 212-362-8835

50 years of esprit de Corps Sargent Shriver, shown with the first Peace Corps volunteers, made the CIA promise never to plant spies in the Corps. (Reuters/Jfk Library) By Katharine Whittemore Globe Correspondent / July 10, 2011 A little name-dropping, and then we’ll move on. Two former New England senators were Peace Corps volunteers: Chris Dodd (Dominican Republic) and the late Paul Tsongas (Ethiopia). Other heavy-hitting ex-volunteers include Donna Shalala (Iran), secretary of health and human services under Bill Clinton, and Reed Hastings (Swaziland), founder of Netflix. And journalists have long been core to the Corps: MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews (Swaziland), Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth (Colombia), and travel writer Paul Theroux (Malawi). Note: When I say “journalist,” fix on the first two syllables. For as we brook the Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary this year, realize there are now 200,000 former volunteers in our midst – and seemingly all of them kept journals. Go . . .

What Peace Corps Volunteer (before he was a PCV) met Hemingway in Spain when Ernie was writing The Dangerous Summer, the story of the rivalry of two great bullfighters–Luis-Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordonez? That summer in Spain this young man approached Hemingway at one of the writer’s lengthy luncheon and asked him how to ‘become’ a writer. There is actually a photograph of the encounter, (it appeared, I think, in the old LIFE magazine) taken from a second-story balcony. It is a photo looking down on Hemingway at a long table of friends of the writer, and the young guy who would, in a few years, become a Peace Corps Volunteer. Who is this PCV? Some hints: 1) He was a PCV in the 1960s; 2) A PCV in Latin America; 3) He later became a magazine writer; 4) He has a brother who was a PCV and CD for the Peace Corps; 5) He wrote a wonderful book about . . .

Reading the current issue of The New York Review of Books I spotted a long piece by Meghan O’Rourke on the new collection The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie. There was a photo of Ann in front of a shelf of books taken by Dominique Nabokov and it is clearly (by its disorganized self) a home book shelf. Scanning it closely to see what she might be reading, I spotted Peter Hessler’s (China 1996-98) latest book, Country Driving.  It is on a shelf of random books, with only a few title readable, Green Metropolis by  David Owen; Hatred of Capitalism by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer; and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. There might have been other RPCV writers on Ann’s shelf, but lookikng closely, I couldn’t find any of my books. Oh, well!

Marty Ganzglass’s (Somalia 1966-68) first novel, The Orange Tree, is the fifth book published by our imprint, Peace Corps Writers. It is a story of the unlikely friendship between an elderly Jewish lady and a young Somali nurse who cares for her. Recently Marty and I exchanged questions and answers about his writing and his long association with Somalia. • Marty, where did you serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer? I went to Somalia, along with my wife Evelyn, from 1966 to 1968. I was a lawyer and worked as legal advisor to the Somali National Police Force, replacing a Ford Foundation lawyer, who coincidentally, went on to become Police Commissioner of New York City (Robert J. McGuire). My assignment was quite unusual for a PCV. You have been connected with Somali for years, in what role? My post Peace Corps service connections with Somalia run deep. When we moved to . . .