Search Results For -2009 books

Bending with the Wind: Memoir of a Cambodian Couple’s Escape to America by Bounchoeurn Sao and Diyana D. Sao (as told to Karline F. Bird (Thailand 1968-70) McFarland & Company, Inc. $35.00 210 pages 2012 Reviewed by Collin Tong (Thailand 1968-69) With the fall of Phnom Penh on April 20, 1975 and the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge came the closing of Cambodia’s border and a cataclysmic reorganization of Cambodian society. As documented in previous histories and first-person accounts, the Cambodian nightmare led to the wave of terror marked by torture and the extermination of intelligentsia. More than two million people, a quarter of the population, perished in the Killing Fields. In 1970, the United States and South Vietnamese forces invaded eastern Cambodia, driving the North Vietnamese army further west. A young Cambodian double agent working for American and Cambodian Special Forces, Bounchoeurn Sao, was stationed near the Cambodian and Lao border. . . .

The Market Bowl (Ages 5-8) by Jim Averbeck (Cameroon 1990-94) Charlesbridge, $16.95 32 pages [Jim Averbeck in Cameroon ate many bowls of ndole (bitterleaf stew), like the kind the Mama Cecile and Yoyo make in The Market Bowl. He also enjoyed  dishes of boa constrictor, crocodile, and deep-fried termites. He is the author of In a Blue Room, a 2009 Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book.  He is also the author and illustrator of Except If and Oh No, Little Dragon!] Reviewed by Thomas Weck (Ethiopia 1965-67) The Market Bowl is a delightful story with an important message for young, impressionable minds.  Yoyo is an endearing young girl, but she has yet to learn the absolute necessity of honesty and fairness.  By taking an ill-advised shortcut, she puts her whole family’s livelihood in danger.  Through contrition, hard work and more than a little courage, in a drama filled scene, she is able . . .

David A. Taylor (Mauritania 1983–85) is the author of three books, including Ginseng, the Divine Root, winner of the 2007 Peace Corps Writers Award for Travel Writing, and Success: Stories, a fiction collection finalist in the Library of Virginia’s 2009 Literary Awards. His recent book is Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America, selected as a Best Book of 2009 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He wrote and co-produced a documentary film of Soul of a People, nominated for a 2010 Writers’ Guild award. He has also written for documentaries on PBS, Smithsonian Channel and National Geographic. You’re invited to a staging of: My People Writers Guild of America Screenplay Reading Series January 9, 2013 David is invited us to a staged reading in New York of a new screenplay based on my book about the 1930s, Soul of a People. The plot goes this way: Three . . .

Africa Lite? Boomers in Botswana Christopher M. Doran (Botswana 2009-11) Author House  (amazon.com $16.95 paperback) 269 pages 2012 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) Warning from the author:  “Do not read this book unless you want to spend the day laughing out loud while being inspired by Africa and the Peace Corps.”   Dr. Christopher Doran and his wife, Maureen, joined Peace Corps in Botswana in their early sixties.  Their accomplishments were many.  They taught 86 medical students the basics of Mental Health, co-authored a book about discussing HIV/AIDS, Power Parents – Our Children and Sex, mentored 40 young adults on issues of leadership, health and HIV, photography and public speaking, and also guided younger Peace Corps Volunteers. Maureen taught reading and writing to “Bee Girls,” culminating in essays that were sent to the author of The Secret Life of Bees.  They gave over 40 workshops, lectures, and presentations . . .

  The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka by Joanna Luloff (Sri Lanka 1996-98) Algonquin Books $22.95 278 pages September 2012 Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93) • Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night. -William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” Blake’s observation is as true of countries as it is of people. Some indeed seem born to endless night. Guatemala. Mozambique. Rwanda. Three otherwise beautiful counties plagued by civil war. There are others, of course. Sri Lanka, an island nation located off the southern coast of India, for example. From 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka was the site of a civil war pitting the government against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, whose aim was to create an independent state in the north and east of the island. Over the 26-year-long war, . . .

The Devil’s Causeway The True Story of America’s First Prisoners of War in Philippines, and the Heroic Expedition Sent to Their Rescue by Matthew Westfall (Philippines 1983-85) Lyons Press $26.95 (hardcover); $12.90 (Kindle) 417 pages 2012 Reviewed by P. David Searles (CD Philippines 1971–74) TO THE EXTENT THAT AMERICANS KNOW anything about the Philippines, they tend to know that the United States played a key role in liberating the country from its 300-year-long Spanish occupation.  They would probably know enough to say that this event took place during the Spanish American War at the end of the nineteenth century.  What they have little or no knowledge about is the fierce, bloody and barbaric war that the United States and the Philippines fought immediately following the dispatch of the Spanish. Even to this day, the United States refuses to give the struggle legitimacy by calling it a ‘War.’  Instead, we insist . . .

27 Months in the Peace Corps: My Story, Unvarnished John Guy LaPlante (Ukraine 2007-09) 559 pages Infinity Publishing, $24.95 (Available as an ebook) 2012   Reviewed by Darcy Munson Meijer (Gabon 1982-84) I’ve just finished John Guy LaPlante’s book about his stint with the Peace Corps in Ukraine 27 Months in the Peace Corps: My Story, Unvarnished. LaPlante is a fluid writer, and I learned quite a bit, but at 559 pages, the book is way too long. At age 78, LaPlante became a Peace Corps Volunteer and served from 2007-2009 as an English instructor in Chernihiv. He was the oldest Volunteer serving in the world in Ukraine. LaPlante is a real trooper, a man of heart and goodwill who, in joining the Peace Corps, fulfilled a longtime personal desire to serve the U.S. In addition to his recounting of daily trials and small victories, he frequently asks himself whether the . . .

[ Tony D’Souza  (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) talks about “Eyes Wide Shut,” his piece on the Nadel Ponzi scheme in the September issue of the Sarasota Magazine. You can read his article on Nadel’s Ponzi scheme in Longform.org alongside articles in The New Yorker, New York Times, and New York Review of Books. Longform.org was picked as one of the best websites of 2012 by Time.] http://longform.org/ An interview by Megan McDonald on the Sarasota Magazine blog: When we first met Tony D’Souza,  38, back in 2005, he was waiting tables at the old Metro Café on Osprey Avenue and about to publish his first novel, Whiteman, based on his experience with the Peace Corps in Africa’s Cote d’Ivoire. Fast forward a few years and D’Souza has gone on to publish two more novels and written for the New Yorker, Playboy, Outside and Esquire, among others; he’s also been featured . . .

Tubob: Two Years in West Africa with the Peace Corps by Mary E. Trimble (Gambia 1979-81) ShelterGraphics $15.95 320 pages 2012 Reviewed by Barbara E. Joe (Honduras 2000-03) Just what does “Tubob” in this book’s title mean? Author Mary Trimble and her husband Bruce, Volunteers sent to The Gambia in 1979, discovered it means stranger or white person. But they didn’t remain strangers for long, though pregnant women shielded their eyes from them to prevent the birth of albino babies. The two were soon given Gambian names; Mary’s was Mariama. They quickly became valued members of their community, she working in health, he in digging wells. By planting a garden and raising chickens themselves, they showed local people how to augment their diet, also debunking a belief that eating eggs causes stupidity. Reportedly newlyweds, I first envisioned them as a young couple, only later learning they were already in their . . .

Levitate the Primate Michael Thomsen (China & Madagascar 2002-05) Zero Books 255 pages Paperback $24.95 August 2012 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) I’m prefacing this review of Michael Thomsen’s collection of essays on dating and sex, Levitate the Primate, with the warning that if one is offended, made squeamish, or in any way turned off or hoping to avoid base, explicit, detailed, unguarded, gratuitous, and sometimes simply gross discussions of sex, sexual desire, sexual body parts, sexual love, blowjobs, handjobs, footjobs, rimjobs, assjobs, fucking, sucking, fisting, Matures, creampies, BBWs, married, cuckold, MILFs, trannies, hentai, and bukkake, please do not read this review. Now that you are all reading along! When this slender, slick, pink book came across my reviewing desk earlier this week, it rose directly to the top of my long to-do list, and I ended up banging through it in a couple of hurried . . .

It would take the lengthy pages of The New York Review of Books(June 7, 2012) to bring these two old Peace Corps African hands together, with one reviewing the other. Theroux’s book, The Lower River, is out this month from Houghton Mifflin, and here’s the basic plot: “Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built . . .