Peace Corps Worldwide

The winners of the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced on Monday night, June 4, 2012, during a sold-out gala ceremony hosted by comedienne Kate Clinton at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. RPCV writer Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962–64) writing at Richard Stevenson, won the Gay Mystery award for his novel Red White Black and Blue, published by MLR Press. Taking place the same week of Book Expo America — the book publishing industry’s largest annual gathering of booksellers, publishers, and others in the industry — the Lambda ceremony brought together over 400 attendees, sponsors, and celebrities to celebrate excellence in LGBT literature. As “mastress” of ceremonies, Clinton treated the audience to her brand of topical, political comedy. She joked, “If you’re here to buy a Big Gulp or smoke a cigarette in a park . . . you’ll have to go to New Jersey.” Later she . . .

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester (Yemen 1988–90) Free Press $26.99 (hardback), $16.99 (Kindle) 230 pages 2012 Reviewed by Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962–64) TOBY LESTER’S DELIGHTFUL BOOK about Leonardo da Vinci reminds me of my mother-in-law. Barbara Wheaton is both a renowned professional food historian and an accomplished amateur art historian who, on a recent family trip to Paris, told the rest of us in her clear-headed and often witty way everything we needed to know about everything we saw, heard or tasted, but never more than we wanted to know. Like Barbara, Toby Lester is the best kind of traveling companion, especially when visiting places we’ve probably been to before, like Paris, or in Lester’s case ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy. Who would have thought that surprises about these places were still in store, or that there . . .

Kevin Lowther’s (Sierra Leone 1963-65)  will be interviewed on Blog Talk Radio, Thursday, June 7 at 9 pm EST. The subject will be his book, The African American Odyssey of John Kizell. The host is Bernice Bennett of “Research at the National Archives and Beyond.” The link is below. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bernicebennett/2012/06/08/the-african-american-odyssey-of-john-kizell–kevin-lowther#. Tune In!

An American Family Peter Lefcourt (Togo 1962–64) Amazon Digital $3.99 (Kindle) 454 pages March 2012 Reviewed by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64) Over the weekend I read two family sagas: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor, the late great southern writer from Tennessee, and Peter Lefcourt’s An American Family. The novels couldn’t have been more different. Taylor came out of that rich southern tradition of liquid prose, a fellow traveler of Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, William Styron, and many more, including our own Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76) and Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 1965–67). Taylor’s novel was published in 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf. For some reason, and I don’t why, I happen to have an autographed first edition of this book. Like all Knopf books, it is a work of art, the Note on Type says it was set on the Linotype in Janson, “a recutting . . .

Bill Hemminger (Senegal 1973-75) published African Son in April and will be reading from his book at Barnes & Noble Bookstore this Saturday, June 2, 2012, at 2 p.m. B&N is located at 624 S. Green River Road in Evansville, Indiana. Today Bill is Chair of the English Department at the University of Evansville where he also teaches French, translates African writers, writes poetry, plays classic music, and  authored “Friend of the Family” that won the 1994 Syndicated Fiction Project competition sponsored by National Public Radio. This is his first book. Bill started out in life by getting his B.A. from Columbia University. Next he studied piano at Juilliard in Manhattan, French at the Sorbonne, and then he went to Senegal. Later he got his Ph.D. in literature at Ohio University and followed that with Fulbrights to Madagascar and Cameroon. Bill wrote me recently to say, “My memories from my . . .

Blaming Japhy Rider: Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who Survived by Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. (Togo 1978) Balboa Press $17.99 (paperback); $35.95 (hardcover) 248 pages 2012 Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65)   PHILIP BRALICH HAS WRITTEN A BRAVE BOOK. His memoir, Blaming Japhy Rider, depicts the unsettling tale of his struggle to recover from a tragedy that occurred during his Peace Corps service. In 1978 in their first year in Togo, West Africa, he and his wife, newly married before entering the Peace Corps, set off for home in Lama Kara on their motor scooter after a party with other Volunteers. He was driving, with her riding on the back, along a rutted dirt lane when they were hit by an oncoming car sending them flying off the road into a dried river bed. He heard her calling for help but he couldn’t move or even turn over to . . .

The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland by Kevin G. Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963–65) The University of South Carolina Press $39.95 (hardcover) Kindle & Nook $15. 326 pages May 2011 Reviewed by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04) JOHN KIZELL LIVED A LIFE THAT could easily read as fiction. Born in West Africa in about 1760, he was falsely accused of witchcraft in his home village in order to dispose of him as a slave. He survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic (one in five of his fellow captives perished) and was purchased in Charleston, South Carolina, on the eve of the American Revolution. During the war, he took up arms as a loyalist, believing this the best path to freedom. In payment, he and a number of other black loyalists were evacuated by the British . . .