Search Results for “2009 books” – Page 5

Peace Corps POD Books

Jan 28 2009

There is an interesting front-page story in the New York Times today, Wednesday, January 28, 2009, about the growth of self-published books. The growth in self-published (or POD books, i.e., print-on-demand books) comes at a time, the article says, when “traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers.” A new study by the National Endowment for the Arts reports that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books. According to Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.” The article has a few great success stories. Lisa Genova wrote a novel about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. It was turned down by 100 literary agents. She paid $450 to iUniverse to publish the book and sold copies to independent bookstores. . . .

UNDERSTANDING IMPERILED EARTH by Todd J. Braje (Tonga)

May 21 2024

Understanding Imperiled Earth by Todd J. Braje (Tonga 1998-20) Smithsonian Books 208 pages April 2024 $17.99 (Kindle); $22.87 (Hardcover) This book is a unique introduction to how understanding archaeology can support modern-day sustainability efforts, from restoring forested land to developing fire management strategies, and is an essential and hopeful book for climate-conscious readers. The world faces an uncertain future with the rise of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, overfishing, and other threats. Understanding Imperiled Earth meets this uncertainty head-on, presenting archaeology and history as critical guides to addressing the modern environmental crisis. Anthropologist Todd J. Braje draws connections between deep history and today’s hot-button environmental news stories to reveal how the study of the ancient past can help build a more sustainable future. The book covers a diverse array of interconnected issues, including: how modern humans have altered the natural world conservation work of Indigenous communities extinction of megafauna like dire . . .

Talking With P.F. Kluge (Micronesia)

Mar 29 2024

When P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) finished his Ph.D. he wasn’t sure what would come next. Then, one of his professors at the University of Chicago suggested the Peace Corps. He applied and dreamed of exotic locations, perhaps in North Africa. But he was assigned to Micronesia, a collection of 2,100 tiny islands in the northern Pacific. That assignment turned out to be a life-defining adventure. It was his Walden Pond. About Kluge’s New Book WORDMAN is Kluge’s 14th book, his fourth book of nonfiction. According to Kluge it is his most personal book, a memoir told largely through published materials that demonstrate, in real-time, how his career developed. There were lucky accidents, like his Peace Corps assignment to Micronesia, which came to influence his fiction as well as his nonfiction. In Wordman Kluge offers a behind-the-scenes look at how his books happen, where the ideas come from, what he . . .

WORDMAN by P.F. Kluge (Micronesia)

Mar 13 2024

Wordman by P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) Peace Corps Writers Publishers January 2024 204 pages $22.00 (Paperback) • • • The summation of a distinguished career in writing fiction, writing for film, travel writing, and teaching, P.F. Kluge’s Wordman is a source book for emerging writers and a memorable set of reflections upon a life spent as a journalist, author, and teacher. Kluge’s service in the Peace Corps in the early 1960s provided an unexpected geographic focus that has accrued to a lifetime of novels and creative nonfiction. Of the many successful Peace Corps writers, P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) is recognized as one of our most accomplished, having published seven novels, two books of nonfiction, and countless articles for The Wall Street Journal, Life, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian. With his Master of Arts degree and a PhD from the University of Chicago, he has been for the last ten years the . . .

Carolyn Mulford (Ethiopia) sums up her long writing career

Feb 14 2024

Fall, 1949, is scary, but exciting, for farm-girl Gail Albright. When she begins junior high at the nearby town of Craigsburg, she has no idea of the struggles and friendships she will find. She’s the butt of jokes made by class snob Veronica Holt, and Veronica’s stuck-up clique. And they especially make fun of Gail for wearing a feedsack dress her mother made for her. After Gail’s first taste of humiliation, she knows she must find a way to overcome her embarrassment and anger. The only thing harder than putting up with Veronica’s mean teasing is finding the strength to beat her at her own game. With a little help from her friends, Gail might just pull it off. Why I Wrote THE FEEDSACK DRESS Posted on February 12, 2024 by Carolyn Mulford . . . Over more than 30 years, I wrote and rewrote The Feedsack Dress, . . .

BETRAYAL by RPCV Phillip Margolin (Liberia)

Jan 17 2024

Betrayal: Robin Lockwood #7 Phillip Margolin (Liberia 1965-67) Minotaur Books Publisher 336 pages November 2023 Hard copy ($23.97); Kindle (14.99), Audiobook (credit) • In Phillip Margolin’s Betrayal, attorney Robin Lockwood finds herself defending her old nemesis in a multiple murder case with too many suspects, where success might cost her own life. Robin Lockwood is now a prominent defense attorney in Portland, Oregon but a decade ago, she was a ranked and rising MMA fighter. Her career came to a quick end when she was knocked out and concussed in the first round by Mandy Kerrigan, a much more talented fighter. Now the situation couldn’t be more different, with Kerrigan on her last legs, her career nearly over, arrested for the quadruple murder of the entire Finch family . . . and Kerrigan’s only possible friend is the attorney she beat so many years ago. For Robin, it’s no simple case: Margaret Finch was . . .

An interview with North Africa Folklorist Deborah Kapchan (Morocco)

Dec 11 2023

RPCVs in the news — Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe. In 2000, Kapchan became a Gugenheim fellow. She has been a Fulbright-Hays recipient twice, and is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She is professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and the former director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology (now the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies) at the University of Texas at Austin. After completing her Bachelors of Arts in English Literature and French at New York University while studying flute performance with Harold Jones in New York, Kapchan went to Morocco in 1982 as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There she learned Moroccan Arabic, and in 1984 got a job doing ethnography in Marrakech and in El Ksiba, Morocco. This experience reoriented her life and in 1985 . . .

Playwright Tom David Barna (Burkina Faso)

Oct 18 2023

The Minnesota Playwright Born in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania-USA, Tom David Barna is a graduate of Kaiserslautern American High School in Germany and New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico-USA. A a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso (1979-80) and a retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Russia. Tom’s father, Thomas Barna was the first family member born in the United States and buried at Arlington National Cemetery having served in the Korean Conflict and the Viet Nam War. Tom David Barna, playwright, has penned more than forty-two full length plays, forty-nine short plays, co-author for a 13-part radio series and author of four children’s books (Cantata Publishing) and several eBooks (Rakuten Kobo Publishing). He has been commissioned for projects as varied as episodic radio and children’s musicals and recently collaborated on a new full-length musical with Melody Bay Productions/Publisher, a . . .

Jonathan Zimmerman (Nepal) | WHOSE AMERICA?

Oct 07 2023

Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools by Jonathan Zimmerman (Nepal 1983-85) University of Chicgo Press August 2022 $22.94 (Paperback), In this expanded edition of his 2002 book, Zimmerman surveys how battles over public education have become conflicts at the heart of American national identity. As the headlines remind us, American public education is still wracked by culture wars. But these conflicts have shifted sharply over the past two decades, marking larger changes in the ways that Americans imagine themselves. In his 2002 book, Whose America?, Zimmerman predicted that religious differences would continue to dominate the culture wars. Twenty years after that seminal work, Zimmerman has reconsidered: arguments over what American history is, what it means, and how it is taught have exploded with special force in recent years. In this substantially expanded new edition, Zimmerman meditates on the history of the culture wars in the classroom—and . . .

Review — THE SHOWGIRL AND THE WRITER by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador)

Sep 29 2023

The Showgirl and the Writer: A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese American Incarceration by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65) Peace Corps Writers 488 pages July 2023 $16.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Eric Madeen (Gabon 1981-83) • By turns leaky and frypan, tarpaper roofed, roughshod dormitories imprisoned 18,000 people of Japanese descent by the end at Tule Lake Japanese American High Security Segregation Camp in Northern California from 1942 to 1946. One degradation followed another, as in the incarcerated being subjected to abominable hole-in-the-wood toilets open side by side all the way down the miserable line. Barbwire topped fences. Armed guards manned watch towers looking down on imprisoned Japanese Americans guilty of no crime. At night the sweep of search lights went back and forth like metronomes. Glazing the whole sad, evil spectacle at Tule Lake concentration camp was a grainy skin of black lava dust, and slathered across . . .

Review — THE SHOWGIRL AND THE WRITER by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador)

Aug 20 2023

The Showgirl and the Writer: A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese American Incarceration by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65) Peace Corps Writers 488 pages July 2023 Reviewed by John Thorndike (El Salvador 1966-68) • This powerful mix of personal and national history unfolds in three parts. First is Marnie Mueller’s own story, starting with her birth in the Tule Lake concentration camp for Japanese Americans, where her Caucasian parents were on the staff. In this relatively short section she describes her childhood, marriage, and life as a novelist. A longer second section traces her years as friend and caregiver to Mary Mon Toy, the showgirl of the title, an actress, dancer and singer of Japanese heritage who was incarcerated in 1942 in another of the “segregation camps.” Mary claims to be half Japanese and half Chinese, something Mueller believes during the years she takes care of the . . .

2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers‘ Maria Thomas Award for Best Fiction

Jul 04 2023

The World Against Her Skin: A Son’s Novel John Thorndike (El Salvador 1967-68) The World Against Her Skin is an extraordinary work, written by a mature, highly published author. John Thorndike defines his book as a “Son’s Novel,” a hybrid memoir/novel or “biographical novel.” It is his endeavor to know his mother, as he openly states in his “Author’s Note, “I want to know everything about my mother,” especially the secrets that were kept from him as her son. He inhabits this woman character in order to know her. His are the height of literary goals; find truth through your imagination, cross boundaries through sympathy and empathy, and do it because you need to for survival. It beautifully flies in the face of current stricture to only write what you can know as determined by your gender, race, ethnicity, class and so on. Thorndike completely succeeds in capturing feelings that many . . .

Paul Newman (Nigeria) | Authority on the Hausa Language

Jul 02 2023

Paul Newman (Nigeria 1961-63) is the world’s foremost authority on the Hausa language. He is also an attorney with special interest in the intersection of language and law. He was a member of the first Peace Corps group to go to Nigeria back in 1961. He has held academic positions at Yale, Bayero University Kano, University of Leiden, and Indiana University. He has published over 20 books and was the founding editor of the Journal of African Languages. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Newman received his B.A. (Philosophy) and M.A. (Anthropology) from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. (Linguistics) from UCLA (1967). Newman also has a law degree (J.D., summa cum laude, 2003) from Indiana University. He is a member of the Indiana Bar. He has held academic and administrative positions at Yale University, Abdullahi Bayero College (now Bayero University Kano), Nigeria; University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and . . .

Mary-Joan Gerson (Nigeria) | Children’s Author

May 22 2023

Mary-Joan Gerson, Ph.D., ABPP, is an Adjunct Clinical Professor, Supervisor and has served as the Director of the Advanced Specialization in Couple and Family Therapy at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Active in Division 39 of the APA, Dr. Gerson is the Founding President of Section VIII, Couples and Family Therapy, as well as Founding Co-Chair of the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Health, and the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Community. She is the author of many journal articles and book chapters including a full-length book, The Embedded Self: An Integrative Psychodynamic and Systemic Perspective on Couples and Family Therapy (second edition. 2009); Routledge. She has served in Nigeria (1965-67) in the Peace Corps, had a Fulbright Fellowship in Namibia, and has taught all over the world, as well as published five award-winning cross-cultural books for children: People of Corn: A Mayan Story Why The Sky Is . . .

Sellwood, Oregon couple and volunteers spend Januarys helping in Africa

Apr 10 2023

By Elizabeth Ussher Groff “Small Steps to a Better World” is the motto of a Sellwood couple who travel to the African country of Ghana every year for three weeks in January. It is not a vacation – but they do arrive back refreshed and inspired by their work there. Upon returning this February, in a letter sent to their local donors, they wrote: “With four borrowed motorcycles and a work truck, five U.S. and many local volunteers were in action for an intensely productive three weeks in northern Ghana.” Lisa Revell, who also teaches a popular “Better Bones & Balance” exercise class at Woodstock’s Trinity United Methodist Church on the corner of S.E. Steele and Chavez Blvd (formerly 39th) – and her husband David Stone, a former Duniway music teacher, and now a PPS substitute teacher – have made their annual trek to Ghana nearly every January for all . . .

Search Results For -2009 books