Peace Corps writers

Using the unlikely topic of tombstones, Ghlee Woodworth, who spent some 13 years with the Peace Corps as a PCV in the Comoros Islands, and then as a Peace Corps Trainer for projects in Namibia, Swaziland, Niger, Bulgaria, Moldova, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Bangladesh, traveling to a total of 45 countries before coming home to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she pieced together a picture of 19th-century Newburyport through the stories of 80 people laid to rest in the Oak Hill Cemetery. And this is only her first volume. Tiptoe Through the Tombstones, which is self published, recently was named runner-up in the Biography/Autobiography category for the 2009 Book of the Year at the New England Book Festival (beating out the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s book, True Compass). It tells the stories of some of Newburyport’s 19th-century founders: ship captains, entrepreneurs and political leaders. “It takes many citizens to build a community, and some of the people I’ve written about were . . .

Eternal on the Water is “A touching love story immersed in the beautiful simplicity of nature and life lived in the present moment,” says novelist Lisa Genove about the new book by Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso 1975-77). Monninger has written fiction and non-fiction, YAs, and memoirs. He had written about boxing matches and sled dogs and Africa. Most recently  he has been writing successful, award winning, Young Adult books, the latest Hippie Chick. Back in 1991 he wrote The Viper Tree set in Ouagodougou, Burkina Faso. Now he has written a big romance about two adults who meet while kayaking on Maine’s Allagash River and fall deeply in love. The two approach life with the same sense of adventure they use to conquer the river’s treacherous rapids. This is a warm love story where two “soul mates” meet by chance, fall perfectly and completely in love, but quickly learn their time together is fated . . .

Reviewer Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962-64) is a writer and policy consultant living on the Umatilla Indian Reservation outside Pendleton, Oregon. Here Tom reviews William F.S. Miles book My African Horse Problem published by the University of Massachusetts Press. • My African Horse Problem by William F. S. Miles (Niger 1977-79) with Samuel B. Miles University of Massachusetts Press 2008 $22.95 208 pages, 26 illustrations Reviewed by Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962–64) My African Horse Problem recounts the intricacies [sic] of this unusual father-son expedition, a sometimes harrowing two-week trip that Samuel joined as “true heir” to the disputed stallion. It relates the circumstances leading up to the dispute and describes the intimacy of a relationship spanning a quarter century between William Miles and the custodians of his family horse — Islamic village friends eking out a precarious existence along the remote sub-Saharan borderline between Nigeria and Niger. Bill Miles is a . . .

Reviewer Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962-64) is a writer and policy consultant living on the Umatilla Indian Reservation outside Pendleton, Oregon. Here Tom reviews The Heartland Chronicles by Douglas Foley published by the University of  Pennsylvania Press in 1995, then again in 2005. • The Heartland Chronicles by Douglas Foley (Philippines 1962-64) University of Pennsylvania Press 1995; 2005 with Epilogue 264 pages $29.97 Reviewed by Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962–64) Another book that really meets the Peace Corps’ Third Goal of bringing it all back home, let me here applaud Douglas Foley’s THE HEARTLAND CHRONICLES. In 1995 when Foley published the book he was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Now he be a full professor. “A tale of Indians and whites living together in a small Iowa community,” this tidily laid out book relates how Foley got inside Iowa’s tiny but old Meskwaki  Indian culture just at the . . .

Reviewer  Tom Hebert is a writer and policy consultant living on the Umatilla Indian Reservation outside Pendleton, Oregon. Here he reviews  I Am The Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People which first came out in 1976, then was revised in 1985 and again in 2007. • I Am The Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People by Stephen Hirst (Liberia 1962-64) Grand Canyon Association Copyright 2006 by the Havasupai Tribe 2007 276 pages $18.95 Reviewed by Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962–64) The last ethnographic book to be reviewed in this three-part series for you to Amazon and read is Stephen Hirst’s 2006, “I Am The Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People.” First published in 1976 and updated in 1985, this book has the ultimate jacket blurb: “This book is our Bible. We use it to teach our kids who they are.” -Fydel Jones, Havasupai. Book writers . . .

A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Theroux is due out in mid-February from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This is Theroux’s forty-third book, his twenty-seventh novel that includes Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, and The Elephanta Suite, his most recent collection of short fiction, which Time Magazine said was, “a set of brilliantly evocative and propulsive novellas.” This novel is about Jerry Delfont, a travel journalist leading an aimless life, struggling in vain against his writer’s block, and flitting around the edges of a half-hearted romance when he receives a mysterious letter asking for his help. The story he tells is distrubing: a dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel; a seemingly innocent man in flight and fearing for his reputation as well as his life. Well, typical Theroux. Note: A Dead Hand is now available at Amazon — click on either the linked title or the book . . .

Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry By Evan Wolfson (Togo 1978-80) Simon & Schuster, $14.00 256 pages 2004 Tenderfoot Mary Timble (The Gambia 1979-81) Treble Heart Books, $13.50 289 pages January 2010   A Witness in Tunis By J.P. Jones (pseudonym for Phil Jones Tunisia 1966-68) Booksurge, $14.9 410 pages January 2010 Through Our Eyes: Peace Corps In Korea,1966-1981 Editor by Bill Harwood (Korea 1975-77) COMA the Artist Company Korea, $50 200 pages October 2009

Reviewer Bryant Wieneke is the author of a series of suspense novels exploring the idea that a practical, effective and far less militaristic American foreign policy may be achieved through Peace Corps-like principles.  These novels are available at www.PeaceRosePublishing.com. • Thirteen Months of Sunshine Peace Corps Adventures in Ethiopia 1962–1964 by Patricia Summers-Parish (Ethiopia 1962–64) 199 pages $19.95 Publish America October 2009 Reviewed by Bryant Wieneke (Niger 1974–76) Thirteen Months of Sunshine made me wish I’d been a better Peace Corps Volunteer. Patricia Summers-Parish was living in Milwaukee in the summer of 1962 when she was inspired by President Kennedy to apply for the first Peace Corps program in Ethiopia.  Sent to an 8,000-foot-high, overgrown mountain village called Dessie, she taught English to eighth graders in a classroom with no books and innumerable flies.  It is the story of many Volunteers over the Peace Corps’ 50-year history, but the author’s . . .

Reviewer Tony D’Souza’s first novel, Whiteman, received the Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Prize for Fiction, and is loosely based on his Peace Corps service in an Ivory Coast headed for civil war. His second novel, The Konkans, is loosely based on his mother’s Peace Corps service in India from 1969 to 1970 where she met and married his father. Tony has contributed fiction and essays to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Outside, Granta, McSweeney’s, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Fantasy, and is the recipient of two NEA Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and gold and silver medals from the Florida Book Awards. He lives in Sarasota, FL, with his wife Jessyka and two young children, Gwen, 15 months, and Rohan, 5 months. The D’Souzas will be spending the next few months traveling in India. Here, Tony reviews Vello Vikerkaar’s Inherit the Family: Marrying Into Eastern Europe. The author . . .

Visiting author Dr. P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) will start a monthlong lecture series on four classic American novels at 6pm this evening at the American Memorial Park Theater. The series will kick off with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Participants will spend three 90-minute sessions exploring this novel before moving on to the next title. Other books to be discussed over the course of the program include The Old Man and the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, and The Things They Carried. Kluge will examine these books on three levels-what they say, how they say it, and how their themes relate to contemporary life in the Commonwealth. Ample time will be reserved for questions and answers. The program is sponsored by the NMI Council for the Humanities under a “We the People” grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kluge is . . .

After graduating from Brown with a degree in English Literature, reviewer Rajeev Goyal was a PCV in Nepal from 2001 to 2003 where he built a two-stage water pump that helped 400 students get clean water in their school. Today, he leads PushforPeaceCorps.org, having previously run the very successful PushPeaceCorps, a national campaign to expand Peace Corps funding. While in law school at NYU, he founded “Hope for Nepal,” which has raised $250,000 for education and water projects in Nepal. Today, Rajeev is on several boards including the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust. He also blogs for this site. • Against the Current The life of Lain Sigh Bangdel, Writer, Painter and Art Historian of Nepal by Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963–65) with Dina Bangdel Orchid Press, $16.92 258 pages 2004 Reviewed by Rajeev Goyal (Nepal 2001–03) If you have not yet read Against the Current by Don Messerschmidt, you are missing out. Messerschmidt, who has lived on . . .

I came across on the web an hour long talk by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) at Politics & Prose Book Store in Washington, D.C. It was originally broadcast on C-Span. In this hour presentation, Peter talks about his Peace Corps years and his second book, published in 2006, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. This title is derived from an archaeological site in China where the earliest form of writing was found inscribed on shells and bones. Peter also reads letters from his Chinese students who migrated from the countryside to the rapidly growing cities and talks about what it was like to teach in China. Peter was with the third group of PCVs to the country. After his tour Peter worked for the New York Times in China and now is a writer for the New Yorker. His Peace Corps book was called River Town. If you have time, (and you . . .

When I first came back from the Peace Corps and was living and working (and writing) in New York, I invited a young book editor out for dinner and she said to me, “I’ll go to dinner with you, John, but I won’t read your Peace Corps novel.” Well, we have been married thirty plus years now and she still hasn’t read my Peace Corps novel! It has always been difficult to find anyone who will read a book about the Peace Corps as many of you know from having finished your own book. When I first started to track “Peace Corps writers,” and publish with Marian Haley Beil Peace Corps Writers & Readers, I thought the publishing world had had enough Peace Corps first-person-experiences and I am as surprised as anyone that there continues to be published every year very important and well written accounts of life in the developing world written by RPCVs. We have had about . . .

Jack Allison served a 3-year tour with the Peace Corps in Malawi, Central Africa, where he was a public health Volunteer in the bush.  He is best known as a singer/songwriter there, having recorded arguably the most popular song with a message in Malawi — Ufa wa Mtedza (Peanut Flour in Your Child’s Corn Mush).  After Peace Corps, Jack went to medical school, and recently retired after a 30-year career in academic emergency medicine.  He has done three public health stints in Africa — a USAID mission in Tanzania in ’82, a Project Hope Mission in Malawi in ’94, and US State Department mission in Malawi in ’05 — the latter two involved helping to eradicate AIDS in that Central African country.  Since 1967 Allison has raised more than $150,00.00 with his music, and he and his wife, Sue Wilson, have donated these monies to various charitable causes.  (For more . . .

Jeffrey Tayler (Morocco 1988-90; PC Staff/Poland 1992, Uzbekistan 1992-93) book Murderers in Mausoleums was picked as one of the best books of 2009 by Travel Channel’s Worldhum.com.