Search Results For -Eres Tu

Lost Art: The Private Collection by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) I just lost my quarterly royalty check on the way to the bank. It was stuffed into my beige cargo pants’ leg pocket when I climbed onto my motor scooter but gone as I approached the pretty young bank teller. An hour later, my publisher’s representative agreed telephonically to put a “stop payment” on the check. She had one question, “Would you like us to issue a new check or carry this over until the next quarter?” “Carry it over, please.” Thank God my budget does not include book royalties. What for? They are chump change. Over the past decades I have rubbed elbows with both renowned and unknown artists, some of whom have earned some bucks. One water color painter bought a house with cash, then earned next to nothing from painting sales for the following decades. He . . .

[Norm Rush (Botswana, Director 1978-83) was interviewed at length yesterday in the New York Times Magazine about his new book Subtle Bodies, about his life, and about (most importantly, in my mind) his long marriage to Elsa Rush. The couple has been married for 56 years. One of the few things that Sam Brown, who in 1977 was appointed head of Action under Jimmy Carter, did was to hire Elsa and Norm to be one of the first ‘couple’ directors of the agency. The story is that Brown met Elsa and Norm at a party, which is true, but the Rushes, like Sam Brown, had been heavily involved in anti-war politics for many years. Brown was looking for a successful ‘married couple’ to do the job. The Rushes were certainly that successful married couple. PCVs who served under Elsa and Norm have only the highest praise for them as people . . .

John Coyne interviews Susan O’Neill about her new collection of essays Calling New Delhi for Free (and other ephemeral truths of the 21st century) that has just been published by Peace Corps Writers. • Susan, let’s begin with some basic stuff: what is your educational background? I earned an RN at a now-defunct three-year nursing school, Holy Cross School of Nursing, in South Bend, IN. I signed up for the Army while I was a student, so I could help my parents pay the bill with my monthly Army stipend, and afterward, the Army trained me in the Operating Room specialty. Then they sent me to Vietnam (the basis for my short story collection, Don’t Mean Nothing). After that I amassed a degree in Journalism, over 10 years, graduating at last in 1984 from at the U of Maine at Orono. o Where did you serve as a PCV? I . . .

New Madrid is the national journal of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University. It takes its name from the New Madrid seismic zone, which falls within the central Mississippi Valley and extends through western Kentucky. Between 1811 and 1812, four earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7.0 struck this region, changing the course of the Mississippi River, creating Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and ringing church bells as far away as Boston. The editor of the New Madrid Journal is Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79).  Ann is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of the book Easter Vigil, which earned the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and our RPCV Writers and Readers Award. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow as well as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She is also the winner of an Al Smith Fellowship from the . . .

The Liberia One Storybook The First Peace Corps Volunteers to Liberia Tell Their Stories Edited by Geraldine Kennedy (1962-64) Clover Park Press, $22 114 pages 2012 Reviewed by Casey Frazee (South Africa, 2009) Those interested in far-off places will relish in the rich descriptions of life in the Liberia of the mid-1900s, before the late 20th century civil war broke out and closed the Peace Corps program there for nearly 20 years. Volunteers who served in Liberia in the pioneering group are lucky to have a formalized account of their time spent learning how to speak, cook, and live like their West African counterparts. A small, fertile country situated on the western coast of Africa, curving southeast along the Atlantic Ocean, Liberia is a country with a rich, tumultuous history. The country was founded by freed black American slaves in the early 19th century. That history of liberation, optimism and . . .

The Vast Unknown: America’s First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn (Nepal 1973-75) Crown Publishers (a division of Random House). $26.00 300 pages 2013 Reviewed by Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) This is a book of true high adventure. Good reading for those of us who like outdoor adventures and severe challenges. This book is full of them, start to finish. Just a little past half way along, the story of the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition reaches a dramatic climax, of sorts. On May 22, 1963, standing ready to challenge the peak from a point high on the ridge, the two American climbers, Hornbein and Unsoeld, faced a strategic decision. “Favorable luck, strange omens, obstacles, and argument be damned,” they thought. “The dazzling, vast unknown¾a key threshold to the uncertainty… was beckoning them forward and upward.” This “was no longer an academic exercise,” writes Brot Coburn, this was a decision . . .

Faded Gray by Jeffrey Vollmer (Estonia 1997-99) Self Published, $15; ebook $8.00 391 pages March 2013 Reviewed by Darcy Munson Meijer (in Gabon from 1982-1984. Faded Gray by Jeffrey Vollmer is the only Peace Corps Worldwide book I’ve reviewed that involves a corrupt Peace Corps. This and the development of the main character make this work of fiction quite interesting. However, before Vollmer pens additional books, he should take a course in syntax and punctuation or pay an editor to help him with his stories. Faded Gray follows Grayson Palmer, a PCV posted in Estonia, part of the “former Soviet Union’s wild east.” Palmer’s assignment is to author grant proposals for the Tartu Industrial Park and Science Incubator, or TIPSI. Grayson quickly learns that he can make additional money by writing grants for goods and services already funded. As he settles in, he comes to see this not as corruption . . .