Peace Corps writers

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.

Bob Hoover, book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has just picked the Best Books of  2009. On the short (10 books only) non-fiction list is Soul of A People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America” by David A. Taylor (Mauritania 1983–85).  Quoting Hoover in his selection, “This 1930s version of a stimulus package reinvigorated a starving artist class in America with jobs for out-of-work writers. The results, while uneven, were remarkable. Taylor provides a basic history of this project.”   Nicely done, David! Read our review of the book at: https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/rpcv-taylors/  

The Sun–a very fine small magazine published by Sy Safransky in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that you should read (and could write for) just published (January 2010) a short piece by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97)  in their Sunbeams column, which is the back page of the publication. Sunbeams are short items that shed light on a particular topic. Bissell has a comment on the Environment. Tom writes: Environmentalism suddenly struck me as the most obvious philosophy imaginable: Let us not ruin forever where we live and work and breathe and eat. Earth’s future inhabitants will no doubt look upon our current environmental practices–maintained despite all manner of evidence that doing so will result in  planetary ruin–roughly the way we look upon eighteenth-century surgery. And that is if we, and they, are very lucky.” Tom is now teaching creative writing at Portland State (if you are looking for a writing class to take) and you . . .

Reviewer Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, for Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University. She worked with Roma (Gypsies) for fifteen years, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal at the age of fifty-five, then went on to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti for five years. She retired in Florida in 2002. She has written a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert, and is working on a memoir of Haiti. • What the Abenaki Say About Dogs, and other poems and stories of Lake Champlain by Dan Close (Ethiopia 1964–66) 53 pages Tamarac Press $10.00 2009 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) Dan Close met a group of Abenaki Indians sifting through a yellow loader filled with sand, looking for their ancestors’ bones. Someone was building a “new house by the river” and the Abenaki . . .

Reviewer Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing (fiction, poetry, personal essay, freshman comp) at the University of Michigan – Flint. Her Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, was a top-ten finalist in literary fiction in the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year awards. Her most recent publication, “Ordinary Dirt,” was part of a Driftwood Review special issue featuring poems of exactly 100 words.  Her work in multiple genres has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press, and many literary magazines.  She commutes between Flint and Los Angeles with her husband, Ted, who’s also an RPCV (Turkey 1964–66). She took time out to review Larry Kimport’s novel At the Table of Want that was published in October. Here’s what she had to say. At the Table of Want by Larry Kimport (Malaysia 1980-82) October, 2009 338 pages $16.97 Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976–78) Like Larry . . .