Search Results For -Tongue

From the Boston Globe, June 12, 2011: Toughest job you’ll never love by Adam Langer Globe Correspondent (Luci Gutierrez for The Boston Globe) For the past 50 years, the Peace Corps has provided fertile material for a roster of impressive alumni, who include such authors as Kent Haruf, Bob Shacochis, and Paul Theroux. But I wouldn’t expect to see the name Christopher R. Howard, author of “Tea of Ulaanbaatar,” on a Peace Corps recruitment brochure any time soon. Using his brief stint as a volunteer in Mongolia during the late 1990s as his jumping-off point, Howard has produced a debut novel that won’t attract many socially conscious do-gooders to the Corps, but could well appeal to marginally employed slackers seeking to indulge in sex tourism and drug abuse. The Mongolia of [Christopher] Howard’s novel is a memorably bleak, fetid, and sinister place, a likely contender for the world’s least inviting . . .

[This essay (# 1) is from Andrew Clark’s (Senegal 1978-80) unfinished memoir Lost and Found in West Africa. His niece, Michiko Clark, was kind enough to send me the manuscript that the family found after Andrew’s death earlier this year.  This is one of three short sections that I culled from the book.  These pieces show how well Andrew understood Senegal, and it gives us all a feeling of how much he loved his host country. In the old days we would have called  him a Super Vol.] Arrival Perhaps the greatest gift that Senegal and Africa gave me was the ability, on a mere moment’s notice, to plunge right back into that world, see once again the faces, recall snatches of conversations, hear voices and laughter and cries, and relive experiences as if they had only just happened minutes before. Even in the dead of a bitter Midwestern winter, I could close my eyes . . .

When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years by Stanley Meisler (PC/HQ 1963-67) Beacon Press 272 pages February 2011 Reviewed by Robert B. Textor (PC/HQ 1961-62) STAN MEISLER’S “COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE” in writing this book is significant. During the mid-Sixties, he served as a member, and later deputy director, of the PC’s Evaluation Division, reporting to the legendary Charlie Peters. This evaluation function was initially conceived by Bill Haddad, one of the PC’s founders. Its purpose was to visit the PCVs in the field, and to identify problems before they became serious, so that corrective and preventive action could be taken. From the beginning, Haddad and Peters stressed that these evaluators should be journalists or lawyers. (It is no accident that Haddad was a journalist, and Peters was a lawyer). Their reports were to be brutally truthful, and interesting to read — and . . .

Being First: An Informal History of the Early Peace Corps by Robert Klein (Ghana 1961–63) Wheatmark, Inc $19.95 182 pages 2010 Reviewed by Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963–65) GHANA I — Peace Corps groups were Roman-numeraled in the early years  — began with 58 trainees at the University of California at Berkeley. It was July 1961, four months after President John F. Kennedy asked R. Sargent Shriver to establish the Peace Corps. The 58 guinea pigs and their trainers were all too aware that the experiment could rise or fall on the basis of their performance. “That challenge,” Robert Klein writes in Being First, “created a sense of uniqueness which has lasted through the years.” Fifty years, of course, and counting. Klein was a 32-year-old teacher in Harlem when he volunteered. Kennedy’s summons “added a moral dimension” to Klein’s “restless romanticized adventurism.” The group supposedly had been sifted through a . . .

KEN AULETTA HAS WRITTEN the “Annals of Communications” columns for The New Yorker since 1992, and is the author of eleven books, including five national bestsellers. His latest, Googled: The End of The World As We Know It, chronicles the ubiquitous company’s rise to prominence. Among Ken’s other books are: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed And Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman; and Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire. In ranking him as America’s premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.” He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and one of the 20th Century’s top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers. Auletta grew up on Coney Island, attended public schools, earned a B.S. from . . .

Go Home Bones (Poems) by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964–66) Pudding House Chapbook Series $10.00 (to order jen@puddinghouse.com) 30 pages 2010 Quantum Chaos (Poems) by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964–66) Big Table Publishing Company Chapbook Series $12.00 39 pages 2010 Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976-78) IT’S POIGNANT, AND POTENT, to be reading Tony Zurlo’s anti-war poems in his 2010 chapbook Go Home Bones on this day, the ninth anniversary of 9/11. I’m stilled and tearful, as the day’s observances roll out like dirges on NPR, taking in Zurlo’s grief-infused “The Mystery of You,” for example, that ends, “Each morning a diminished/congregation rises/for the ritual./Each prayer/ another syllable missing.” Zurlo won the 2010 Peace Corps Writers Award for Outstanding Poetry Book published by a Peace Corps writer (for his 2009 collection The Mind Dancing). He is a prolific writer (this site, a bit behind, lists 14 books in his bibliography) and his . . .

[I picked this up off the Internet, a recent interview with award winning poet, Susan Rich (Niger 1984-86) done by Seattle pi.  Susan’s new collection of poems, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, will be published on May 1, 2010.] The Writer’s Block: Living a Writer’s Life As I’m sure you all know, it’s National Poetry Month, and I was happy to catch up with a very busy Susan Rich to ask her about her newly released book, The Alchemist’s Kitchen (White Pine 2010). Also the author of Cures Include Travel and The Cartographer’s Tongue ~ Poems of the World, Susan has received awards from PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement, and Peace Corps Writers. Recent poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Poetry International and TriQuarterly. Q: In The Alchemist’s Kitchen, you write about many topics, among them love and loss, journeys and transformation – when did this collection begin . . .