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Wisconsin RPCVs Do It Again! The 2011 International Calendar
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Fear, Loathing, and Thanks in the Home Depot Parking Lot
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Peter Hessler's Book Makes NYTIMES List of 100 Notable Books of 2010
4
The Peace Corps Library – Part I
5
Women Dominate Publishing
6
Review of Michael L. Buckler's From Microsoft to Malawi
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Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97) in Current Issue of The New Yorker
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Mark Brazaitis at Kent State on December 7, 2010
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George Packer Bashes Bush's Book
10
Fast Company Magazine salutes the Peace Corps this month with Facts & Figures
11
Review of RJ Huddy’s Learn Thai With Me
12
Robert Textor and his Cultural Frontiers
13
Columbia River Peace Corps Association Supports RPCV Writers
14
A reading by David Meth from his novel A Hint of Light
15
Peace Corps Records from Overseas Posts – Current Retention Schedule

Wisconsin RPCVs Do It Again! The 2011 International Calendar

The 2011 International Calendar produced by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Wisconsin is now available. It honors the Peace Corps by featuring the first 13 countries to host Volunteers. This 2011 calendar is another beautiful (and useful) publication by this RPCV group. And it is one more step in fulfilling the third goal of the Peace Corps: To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Proceeds from its sale support development projects at home and aboard. Over $900,000 has been donated since the 1988 edition was created by the Madison, Wisconsin group. How’s that for Third Goal work by RPCVS! Congratulations are due these RPCVs. You can order your new International Calendar by writing, calling or emailing the group. The cost is $12.95. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers P.O. Box 1012 Madison, WI 53701-1012 #608.829.2677 e-mail: calendarmail@rpcvcalendar.org www.rpcvcalendar.org

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Fear, Loathing, and Thanks in the Home Depot Parking Lot

Life is unfair as we know and sometimes we have to go to Home Depot on a weekend morning,  even a weekend morning during the Christmas season when every one is buying trees and tools (i.e. toys) for Dad, and what-have-you.  I actually don’t mind the store, but the parking lot is a minefield of loose, lost, and dangerous nails, screws, and other tire-piercing pieces of metal, so I was proceding cautiously through the maze of  car lanes trying to select an area which most likely would have the least heavy metal and came upon an elderly gray-haired guy (well, lets say someone my age!) who was jaywalking down the middle of the car lane. I hit the brakes. He looked around angrily alarmed by my sudden arrival. I did the only sensible suburban thing I could think of: I smiled at him and passed by. Well, when I parked safely (I hoped) and got out of the . . .

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Peter Hessler's Book Makes NYTIMES List of 100 Notable Books of 2010

Country Driving: A Journey Though China From Farm to Factoryby Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) made the The New York Times Book Review(December 5, 2010) list of 100 notable books for the year. This book, the third of Hessler’s “China books,” chronicles the effects of an expanding road network on the rapidly changing lives of individual Chinese.

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The Peace Corps Library – Part I

  The first official mention of a Peace Corps Library is in a July 1965 memo to Charles J. Patterson, a former Acting Associate Director, supporting such a library “for the primary purpose of improved overseas staff orientation.” It was proposed that the agency “gather together in one convenient place a copy of fundamental materials which reflect our experience and which will help overseas staff. Of course these materials would prove of considerable value to the entire Peace Corps. If properly set up it will save the government time, space, and money and will help the agency learn what it has learned already: thus each new employee need not be condemned to relearn for himself what the agency already knows.” (Peace Corps ICE/Library Study December 22, 1982, page 2)   Nineteen sixty-five was an important year for Peace Corps. The agency was four years old, had weathered the assassination of . . .

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Women Dominate Publishing

According to recent articles in Publishers Weekly and The Writer’s Chronicle publishing is a woman’s place. 85% of all publishing employees with fewer than three years experience are now women. Agent Jason Pinter says, “I hope it doesn’t get worse–if 85% of the industry is female–it’s hard to think that acquisitions aren’t in some way affected by that.” But Lindy Hess, director of the graduate Columbia Publishing Course, compares publishing to teaching: a field traditionally open to women. She also added that women tend to read more then men! And add to that insult (for men!) the Washington Post wrote that in the years 2008-2009, for the first time in U.S. history, women earned more doctorates than men. According to the Council of Graduate Schools: 28,962 doctoral degrees went to women and 28,469 to men. But what about ‘show me the money’? Well, here men out score women. According to Publishers Weekly’s . . .

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Review of Michael L. Buckler's From Microsoft to Malawi

From Microsoft to Malawi: Learning on the Front Lines as a Peace Corps Volunteer (memoir) by Michael L. Buckler (Malawi, 2006–08) Hamilton Books $19.95 228 pages November 2010 www.FromMicrosofttoMalawi.com Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras, 1975-77) FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN CURRENT AFRICAN AFFAIRS, this is the book for you. Another valuable addition to Peace Corps Experience literature, it was written and published only two years after the author hugged his African family and returned. Not a timid soul, Michael L. Buckler describes his home in Malawi, and explores several controversial topics such as the overlap of services offered by the Peace Corps and non-governmental agencies, the U.S. foreign aid package, American subsidies and their effect upon other nations, Volunteer use of anti-depressants and Volunteer sexual debauchery. He does something else that reminded me of the infamous postcard incident so long ago. He published a book with an unflattering portrait of . . .

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Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97) in Current Issue of The New Yorker

Last week it was George Packer (Togo 1982-84) in the pages of The New Yorker. This week (December 6, 2010), Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97), who wrote about his brief Peace Corps tour in Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, has a long, long piece (what else would be in The New Yorker?) entitled “A Simple Medium” that focuses on Chuck Lorre who produces sitcoms like “Two and a Half Men.” Bissell is the author of five books, including  Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, which orginated with a New Yorker piece published in 2008. My guess is that with this current piece in the magazine Tom has one-third of his next book already written. [Extra Lives was reviewed by Bruce Schlein (Papua New Guinea 1990–92; Bosnia 1996; PC/Staff/DC 2003–05) earlier this year. Check is out at: https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/review-extra-lives/ ]

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Mark Brazaitis at Kent State on December 7, 2010

Mark Brazaitis is the author of The Other Language: Poems, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. He is also the author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, the novel that won the 2001 Maria Thomas Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Writers. Brazaitis served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala from 1990 to 1993 and as a Peace Corps technical trainer in the same country from 1995 to 1996. Currently, he directs the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University. On December 7, 2010, Mark will be reading at the Kent State Student Center, Room 306, and answering questions about the Peace Corps! There’s a Facebook page for the reading: http://en-gb.facebook.com/event.php?eid=150186528348926&index=1 Check it out!

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George Packer Bashes Bush's Book

Often when an RPCV book is reviewed on this site and receives a negative review I get an angry email from the irate author who says something to the effect, “I wrote it, therefore, it is good!” Well, having published something like twenty-five books and received more than my ‘fair share’ of negative reviews, I can understand the feeling. But if a writer —  especially a ‘self-publishing writer — has the audacity (yes, audacity!) to publish anything and then put the book out into the market place for others to buy and read, then, well, they have to suffer the slings and arrows, and perhaps praise, for what they wrote. That’s what publishing is all about. But if you are George W. Bush and you write your memoir and it gets into the hands of George Packer (Togo 1982–83) to review it for The New Yorker . . . well, watch out. Packer does a . . .

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Fast Company Magazine salutes the Peace Corps this month with Facts & Figures

The 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps Infographic: Peace Be With You Typography by Julie Teninbaum By: Jeninne Lee St. John, FastCompany.com November 1, 2010 Fifty years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy gave a name to his idea to send Americans abroad “to encourage mutual understanding between Americans and other cultures of the world.” A look at the numbers behind the venerable Peace Corps. The FIRST group of volunteers, 51 strong, arrived in Ghana on August 30, 1961. Since 1961, more than 200,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps. 7,671 volunteers now serve in the Corps. In 1966, there were more than 15,000 in the field. The Peace Corps’ operating budget this fiscal year is $400 MILLION, about 1% of the federal government’s foreign-operations budget. Peace Corps volunteers here been trained in more than 250 local languages. 60% of ACTIVE Corps members are women. Today, the Corps . . .

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Review of RJ Huddy’s Learn Thai With Me

Learn Thai With Me by RJ Huddy (Morocco 1981–82) XPat Fiction $12.00 (free to read online) 224 pages 2010 Reviewed by Thomas Coyne (Morocco 1981–82) SAUDI ARABIA IS A HARD PLACE TO WRITE ABOUT. The western mind gets easily distracted by such cultural flash points as hijabs and theocracies. The Saudi sensibility seems clannish; not so interested in advertising its lifestyle to the rest of the world. So surprise, Learn Thai With Me, the second novel from RJ Huddy, (a nom de plume of a Moroccan RPCV) is a rare example evoking the Saudi Arabia of the 1980’s. Of course, this is really a book about Americans — Degenerates Abroad perhaps — and not so much about Saudis or Thais. There are some other caveats. For one thing, Learn Thai With Me will not teach you much — if any — Thai. In fact, we are given not a single . . .

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Robert Textor and his Cultural Frontiers

The mentioning of Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps, edited by Robert B. Textor, with a foreword by Margaret Mead, on this blog brought comments from a few readers, and brought me to pulling Textor’s book off my shelf of Peace Corps books (God, there are so many Peace Corps books!) to look again at this important book on the agency published in 1966 by The M.I.T. Press. Robert Textor, for those who weren’t around at the beginning of the Peace Corps, was a early consultant to the Peace Corps, starting in the summer of 1961 while a Ph.D. student at Harvard. He was asked to Washington to help plan the training program for the first PCVs to Thailand. He would make other important contributions to the agency during those early first years, including writing the memo that outlined the In-Up-Out policy for the Peace Corps staff, a memo  Textor sent on December 11, 1961, . . .

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Columbia River Peace Corps Association Supports RPCV Writers

Bill Stein (Niger 1990-93) President of the Columbia River Peace Corps Association sent out a notice on upcoming meetings with RPCV authors.  Bill and his group are supporting our writers. Thanks, Columbia River! Monday, December 6, 2010:  Tinker, Irene: Crossing Centuries: A Road Trip Through Colonial Africa (2010).  The website now contains transit directions to Irene Tinker’s home in the Mirabella Portland. Wednesday, January 12, 2011: Moritz  Thomsen (Ecuador 1965-67) Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle (1969).   Note that this book was earlier slated for discussion in February. Mid-February 2011 (date TBA): Peter Hessler (China 1996-98): River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001).  Peter Hessler will be at Powell’s City of Books on 2/15 reading from his latest book, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (2010), and he’s graciously offering to meet with us some time during his Portland visit that’s not booked by his publicist.  We’re . . .

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A reading by David Meth from his novel A Hint of Light

Westport author David L. Meth [Korea 1971–72] reads from his new novel, “A Hint of Light,” at the Westport CT Public Library. Written by Nancy Burton for Patch.com When Westport writer David L. Meth was a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970s in Seoul, Korea, he “walked the streets” to pick up the cultural vibes. Now he has self published his first novel based on real characters who have haunted his psyche ever since. Meth gave a reading from his book, A Hint of Light, at the Westport Public Library on Monday, sharing passages of prose of sometimes exquisite piquancy. The main character is a street urchin named Byung-suk, who is 9 years old when the book opens. Byung-suk is the product of a tryst involving a Korean prostitute and a black American soldier stationed in Seoul. Byung-suk’s mother died in an alleyway during childbirth and he grows up a . . .

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Peace Corps Records from Overseas Posts – Current Retention Schedule

  The Retention Schedule dictates the official disposition of public records from federal agencies, including the Peace Corps. Records are designated as temporary or permanent; to be destroyed or ultimately archived when they are not longer needed for day-to-day operations. Each agency develops its own recommendations on this phase of record management, which are then submitted to the National Archives and Records Administration for approval. This summary is the current Retention Schedule for Peace Corps records from Overseas Posts. I received this information in response to a FOIA request. The response is dated March 17, 2010. I do not know how long such instructions have been in effect. The Retention Schedule and its description of records is public information. However, I presume that many of the individual records may not be considered public information, depending on how the content is ultimately classified. This is a summary of the information from . . .

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