Books

Taking Stock of two decades of work by Tom Bissell. In 2022, Peace Corps Writers recognized him as the Writer of the Year.

By Steven Boyd Saum

Tom Bissell photo courtesy Penguin Random House

It was at the Downtown Bookfest in Los Angeles that I met Tom Bissell half a dozen years ago. Along with celebrating “Literary LA: Places, Spaces, and Faces” and the independent book scene, some of us read tributes to writers the community had lost in the past year—poets and fictioneers, tellers of true stories and writers of screenplays. I found myself talking with Bissell about a living writer we both knew and admired, Ron Hansen—whom I had worked with on editing a magazine for a decade, and who has been a finalist for the National Book Award and is a deacon in the Catholic church. For Bissell, the timing was interesting; he had just published Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, a book tracing journeys to understand Christianity and the faith Bissell had lost at age 16. “What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” Bissell writes in the last chapter of Apostle. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine.”

Ah — but what Bissell has imagined, and what other journeys he has undertaken as a writer! Those efforts have garnered him a Guggenheim, the Rome Prize, the Anna Akhmatova Prize, honors from the Writers Guild of America, as well as previous recognition from Peace Corps Writers for best travel book for Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. In that 2003 book, his first, he sought to fathom the geography and history of the Aral Sea and the lands surrounding it — a part of the world Bissell had come to know serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan in 1996.

More on that in a moment. First, a quick synopsis of Bissell’s literary ascent. Born in 1974 and raised in Escanaba, Michigan, he is a writer who once upon a time hardly seemed destined to finish high school. His father was a Vietnam vet who had served in the Marines with Philip Caputo, who went on to pen a landmark memoir of the war and many books since. Young Tom got encouragement and advice from Caputo as well as writer Jim Harrison. Bissell became the would-be writer who headed for community college and, with coaxing from a professor there, wound up at the Bennington Summer Writers Workshop and worked with writer Bob Shacochis. Bissell followed that up by becoming the would-be writer who struck out with every application to MFA programs after finishing college at Michigan State. Having had one of his classes visited by a woman who had been in the Peace Corps, Bissell wrote Shacochis — who had served in the Peace Corps in the Eastern Caribbean 1975–76 — asking if he, too, should join. Shacochis sent back a postcard with a one-word answer: “Yes.”

Off to Uzbekistan Bissell went, a few years after that country achieved independence. But Bissell left Peace Corps service early, after suffering physical ailments and grappling with severe depression. Next failure: being turned down for a job at the local paper mill. But he gained a foothold in the literary world through an internship at Harper’s.

 “My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another,” Tom Bissell once told an interviewer. Photo courtesy Penguin/Random House

A few milestones on the literary journey since: true stories and fiction in multiple best-of-the-year collections, screenplays and more than a dozen video game scripts, and books of imagination and empathy. Among those books, of which there are ten or so to date: The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007), in which father and son travel together to Vietnam. There are Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010) and Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (2012) — which includes a marvelous essay I’ve shared with aspiring writers, “Escanaba’s Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.” And there is the hilarious memoir he co-wrote with actor Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life inside ‘The Room’, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, which appeared in 2013 and was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film starring James Franco. Julia Loktey and Werner Herzog have also made Bissell’s work into films.

Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt! And they do.

Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, “Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt!” And they do.

As for what brings Bissell writer-of-the-year accolades from Peace Corps Writers: Recognition for his most recent collection of stories, Creative Types (2021), an exploration in fiction in which those peripheral creative types don’t tend to come off looking so good. To wit: an assistant to James Franco (“The Hack”); a producer of reality TV; a flailing travel writer; a broken-down writer having a fling in Estonia (“Love Story, with Cocaine”); and a pair of newish parents in LaLa Land who try to liven up their marriage by hiring a sex worker for a ménage à trois.

Bissell’s work for the screen has been on display of late, too: For Apple TV+ he co-created the television series The Mosquito Coast, which debuted in 2021 and is based on the renowned book by writer Paul Theroux, who served as a Volunteer in Malawi 1963–65.

Writer's work: Tom Bissell co-created “The Mosquito Coast” for television, co-wrote the video game “Uncharted 4: A Thief's End,” and has been tapped to work on “Star Wars: Andor.” 

So what’s next for Bissell? Perhaps it’s helpful to keep in mind what he confided to Publishers Weekly a while back: “My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another.” So don’t look for another story collection right away. Perhaps look for him in a galaxy far, far away: He’s been tapped to join the writers for the next season of the series Star Wars: Andor, which streams on Disney+. As showrunner Tony Gilroy put it, “Tom Bissell is a really cool and really, really interesting, versatile, really good writer.” No argument here. Also in Bissell’s favor, for this gig: “A very, very, very big Star Wars fan.”

This essay appears in the Winter 2023 edition of WorldView Magazine.

In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. Read about the rest of the writers recognized with 2022 Peace Corps Writers awards here. 

The people’s writer, love and marriage spats in Kazakhstan, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, a C-section by flashlight in Paraguay, and an epic journey by bicycle

We make sense of the world and our interwoven lives through stories. Some of these find form years later as books — and they’ve launched more than a few literary careers. In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. In 2022 they recognized the following writers and works with Peace Corps Writers awards.

The Writer of the Year Award recognizes the work of Tom Bissell. Read an essay on him by Steven Boyd Saum here.

Paul Cowan Award for Best Work of Nonfiction

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Patrick Chura

SUNY Press

Michael Gold earned recognition as the People's Writer — then disappeared from the canon. Photo via Wikicommons.

In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” This biography brings to light, as Michael Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America—a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.

In addition to a mastery of research, synthesis, analysis, compassion, and fluid prose in vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America”—one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community. An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and suffered as a result of their beliefs and actions.

Chura himself served as a Volunteer in Lithuania 1992–94 and is a professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural studies.

—Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65)

Read Marnie Mueller’s full review in the previous edition of WorldView. 

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir 

Love and Latrines in the Land of Spiderweb Lace

A Peace Corps Memoir

Mary Lou Shefsky

Blurb

Mary Lou Shefsky served as a health education Volunteer in Paraguay 1974–76. Among the experiences she writes of: assisting as a doctor in a rural health center performed an emergency C-section, using only local anesthetic. “My job would be to hold the flashlight on this dark, rainy morning,” she writes, “because the town’s generator only operated a few hours each evening.” Paraguay was a dictatorship at the time; Shefsky adapted to life under those political circumstances. She worked on a sanitation project and appeared with fellow Volunteer (and future husband) Stephen and a group of schoolchildren on national television to sing “The Hookworm Song.”

Shefsky went on to earn a master’s in public health from Yale and spent decades working in community health, farm worker housing development, and teaching. She and Stephen have returned to Paraguay multiple times over the decades.

Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award 

I Miss the Rain in Africa

Peace Corps as a Third Act

Nancy Daniel Wesson

Modern History Press

“When the rain arrives, it is mythic,” writes Nancy Wesson of her time in Gulu, northern Uganda 2011–13. “No polite, spitting rain this. It is glorious, torrential, and loud in its own right, but rains here don’t usually come alone. Soul-rattling thunder accompanies lightning strikes that kill hundreds every year — entire schoolrooms of children at once. Lake Victoria, near Entebbe, boasts the highest number of lightning strikes in the world according to Google Maps.”

Wesson grew up in Louisiana and left a successful consulting business to serve as a Volunteer at age 64, when many would be preparing to head into retirement. This memoir traces her experiences as a Volunteer and returning to the U.S. — and completing a book very different from the one she set out to write. The book earned a Silver Nautilus Award for its writing about world cultures’ growth and development.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Third Goal Effort

Lucky

An African Student, An American Dream, and a Long Bike Ride

Brooke Marshall

Atramental Publishing

“In the summer of 2018, I rode a bike named Lucky from Raleigh to Seattle,” Brooke Marshall writes. “I covered 5,085 miles in a little over three months, solo.” It was an epic journey in its own right—and one with a purpose.

While serving as a Volunteer in Malawi 2013–15, Marshall “met a lot of talented students who wanted to go to college, but couldn’t afford it.” She helped some apply for study at universities abroad; two benefited from a foundation scholarship program. The next year, she helped students apply to some 25 schools, building contacts with admissions counselors at institutions that potentially offered full scholarships for international students. She also successfully petitioned Educational Testing Service, which administers the Test of English as a Foreign Language, to offer a non-computer-based version of the test, to make the test accessible — and fairer — to students who didn’t have regular access to required tech.

All that is prelude to the journey at the heart of Lucky. After Marshall returned to the U.S., she created the Represent Foundation and embarked on that bike tour, during which she met with admissions counselors at 18 universities. She told them about the students in the village where she taught and of their potential. She raised funds to help students pursue their education in Malawi — where the funding goes farther, and educational opportunities more closely within reach.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Young Adult Fiction

The Adventures of Mayana

Falling Off the Edge of the Earth

David Perry

Independently Published

David Perry (Belize 1985–87) tells the story of a 17-year Belizean girl named Mayana who finds herself on an adventure in a fantasyland of magic, monsters, and intrigue. She crosses into an alternate reality where the laws of nature and science are very different from what she learned. While she attempts to find her way back to Belize, she befriends a young man who speaks only in parables. He helps Mayana use her newfound magic powers to fight monsters and witches and to attempt to find her
way home.

This is Perry’s first novel. For more than 30 years he has taught and served as an educational administrator. He has also returned to Belize regularly over the years with his wife, Anaceli, who calls that country home.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Short Story Collection

A Husband and Wife Are One Satan

Stories

Jeff Fearnside

Orison Books

This slim collection by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04) comprises five stories set in Kazakhstan. Each story is a gem and focuses on a unique aspect of Kazakh life. “Accomplices to a Tradition” illuminates the practice of bride stealing; a woman is, essentially, kidnapped by a man and then, if accepted by his family, must marry him. On display here: police corruption; tensions between ethnic Russians, such as the narrator of the story, and ethnic Kazakhs; and the ubiquity of the vodka bottle.

The title story delves into the lives of customers in a village café operated by Raim and Railya, an ethnic Tatar couple. There is Kolya, a Russian Christian, who is married but comes to the café with his girlfriend; Murat, a Kazakh Muslim and his Russian friend, Tikhan; a pair of teenage girls looking for husbands; and an older, widowed alcoholic. Raim and Railya discover that their business becomes more robust when they argue loudly in front of their customers, providing endless entertainment, and they each give as good as they get. (The title of the story comes from a saying that means, essentially, “It takes two to tango.”) The plot takes a darker turn  when the arguments get out of hand.

Some stories touch on the changes in Kazakhstan over the years, from its contributions to the Great Patriotic War to its independence after the collapse of the USSR. Traditions and struggles persist. It is gratifying to read about them in the hands of a skillful writer like Fearnside. •

—Clifford Garstang (Korea 1976–77)

Maria Thomas Award for Best Book of Fiction 

A Thousand Points of Light

Marc-Vincent Jackson

Page Publishing

After three decades of teaching languages in the U.S. and elsewhere, Marc-Vincent Jackson (Senegal 1986–89) has published his debut novel, a tale of interwoven lives in Senegal in the 1980s. The story centers on Fatou, an outcast Senegalese woman. “To start at the beginning,” says one narrator, “that is not such a long time ago; stories and Africa have the same age. Since we all go so far back, history is our life; our pasts and presents are the same. I come from a long line of griots, so I know the history of the world and everyone in it. Thus, I know who I am and what I must do to live my history. I know, in this way, everyone. But because I love Fatou, it is her story I know the best.”

The novel is inspired by Jackson’s Peace Corps service during the presidency of George H.W. Bush — when the phrase “a thousand points of light” widely entered the national lexicon.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book

Rwanda and the Mountain Gorillas

Steve Kaffen

Independently Published

Land of a Thousand Hills — and the best tea in the world. Photo by Steve Kaffen

Landlocked Rwanda, in the Great Rift Valley, is one of Africa’s smallest and most densely populated countries, and one of its most diverse. Nicknamed “Land of a Thousand Hills,” the country is blanketed with rolling farmland. Travel writer Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994–96) notes that it is also home to Volcanoes National Park — with mountain gorillas in the higher elevations and golden monkeys down below — and Nyungwe National Park rainforest, where sources of both the Nile and Congo Rivers can be found. The book includes more than 150 original photos.

Throughout the country are memorials to the victims of the genocide in spring 1994. Offsetting the trauma is the resilience of Rwanda’s warm and outgoing population. Their desire for stability and solidarity is exemplified by umaganda, a morning of public service on the last Saturday of the month when all Rwandans engage in volunteer work for the betterment of their communities.

Marian Haley Beil Award for Best Book Reviews

D.W. Jefferson

This award goes to D.W. Jefferson for his body of work, which includes more than 30 insightful reviews for Peace Corps Worldwide. Jefferson also assists authors publishing with the Peace Corps Writers imprint. He served as a Volunteer in El Salvador 1974–76 and in Costa Rica 1976–77. He has worked as a software engineer, taught programming and database management, worked as a Spanish language translator and interpreter, and is a longtime member of the RPCVs of Wisconsin-Madison, a group known by returned Volunteers around the world for publishing the annual Peace Corps International Calendar.

See more about books in this section at peacecorpsworldwide.org.

A Life Unimagined: The Rewards of Mission-Driven Service in the Peace Corps and Beyond

By Aaron S. Williams

International Division, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

Aaron S. Williams grew up in a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s. When he began studying geography at Chicago Teachers College, it was because the subject would offer him good career opportunities in the public schools. But, as he notes early in the memoir A Life Unimagined, “studying the geography of distant places around the world…the seeds once planted by my father of distant travels began to take root.” That’s not to say his father encouraged him to join the Peace Corps; he didn’t. But his mother and his best friend both did.

“My choice to join the Peace Corps changed everything,” Williams writes. For his mother, too; she would visit him when he was a Volunteer in the Dominican Republic, and over his two decades as a foreign service officer with USAID in Honduras, Haiti, Barbados, and Costa Rica. It was only because of failing health in her older age that she didn’t visit her son and his family in South Africa, where Williams was stationed not long after the end of apartheid. The day after he arrived to begin leading the USAID mission, Williams met President Nelson Mandela.

Rewind for a moment: After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer 1967–70, Williams took on responsibilities for the agency coordinating minority recruitment. He earned an MBA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then went to work in the corporate world, learning the ropes in the food industry. That set him on track for work in U.S. government-supported agribusiness development in Central America.

The capstone of his career in public service came in 2009, when Williams was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as Director of the Peace Corps—the first African-American
man to hold the post. During Williams’ tenure, the Peace Corps marked its 50th anniversary, with celebrations around the world. The agency also secured a historic budget increase and reopened programs in Colombia, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Nepal, and — in the wake of the Arab Spring — Tunisia. In terms of program successes, Williams points to new and expanded initiatives in Africa to address hunger, malaria, and HIV/AIDS — through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President’s Malaria Initiative, Feed the Future Initiative, and Saving Mothers, Giving Life.

Aaron Williams with Senator Harris Wofford at his confirmation hearing in 2009. Wofford was a friend and mentor to Williams, and he introduced Williams that day.
Photo Courtesy of Aaron S. Williams

In terms of challenges, the year 2011 brought intense scrutiny to the agency following an investigation by the ABC news program “20/20” examining how six women serving as Volunteers had been victims of sexual assault. The program also looked at the tragic murder of Volunteer Kate Puzey, after she reported that a teacher at her site in Benin was sexually abusing students. Puzey’s death occurred some months before Williams became director, but the serious questions her murder raised about safety, security, and confidentiality still needed to be addressed. Williams worked with Congress to institute reforms, such as heightened security, and training and support for victims, that led to the passage of the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act, signed by President Obama in November 2011.

Before his Peace Corps leadership role, Williams served as vice president of international business development for RTI International. In 2012, after stepping down from the directing the Peace Corps, he returned to RTI as executive vice president the International Development Group and now serves as senior advisor emeritus with the organization.

In his public writing in recent years, Williams has called on U.S. foreign affairs agencies to rise to demonstrate leadership in pursuing policies and programs that will improve diversity in their ranks by investing in the diverse human capital of our nation, to reflect the true face of America. And, not surprising, he has been a strong advocate for public service here in the U.S. Indeed, the foreword for his memoir—contributed by Helene Gayle, who formerly led the Chicago Community Trust and now is president of Spelman College, makes the case for that: “I hope that the life and career of Aaron Williams, as portrayed in this book, will inspire future generations of underrepresented groups in our society, both men and women, who seek to make a difference by serving America and the world at large.”

Celebrating Fifty Years

AN EXCERPT FROM A LIFE UNIMAGINED BY AARON S. WILLIAMS

The American Airlines Boeing 727 began its descent from our flight that began in Miami, passing at a low altitude over the beauty of lush, emerald-green mountains, aquamarine-colored ocean, and long white beaches. Eventually the sprawling city of Santo Domingo appeared, separated by the Ozama River as it coursed its way into the Caribbean. This country held special memories for Rosa and me—it was my second home and where she was born. We gazed over the country’s natural beauty during another landing in the modern Airport of the Americas, a trip we’d made so many times since 1969. This arrival felt very different from my first at the old airport in December 1967 when I was a newly minted PCV.

This return to my beginnings in the Peace Corps highlighted for me the incredible journey that began as a college graduate’s surprising path to adventure. Here, I met my beautiful wife, seated beside me as we returned “home,” back to where my life was transformed. We were going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the warm, friendly relationship created between this nation and the Peace Corps Volunteers who had served here throughout its rich history. That unique, historical bond, forged in the white heat of the Dominican revolution and the U.S. invasion in 1965, had brought about this seminal moment. During that time of strife and struggle, many of the PCVs of that era gained the respect of Dominican citizens by vigorously supporting the country’s revolutionaries and not following the Johnson administration’s official policy during a crucial period in Dominican history.

This return to my beginnings in the Peace Corps highlighted for me the incredible journey that began as a college graduate’s surprising path to adventure.

On this trip, Rosa and I would be participating in a series of events to celebrate, commemorate, and treasure the more than 500 participants who had worked side by side with the Dominican people in the spirit of friendship and peace. Current and former Volunteers and staff would reunite at a three-day conference and share in the success of 50 years of Peace Corps work in the Dominican Republic. This auspicious anniversary also presented us with the chance to engage with Peace Corps Volunteers and staff worldwide and observe the scope and impact of the organization’s 50-year global engagement. I experienced firsthand the warm reception that Peace Corps Volunteers continue to receive worldwide.

Our gracious hosts for these anniversary events were Raul Yzaguirre, U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, and country director Art Flanagan. Yzaguirre is an icon in the Hispanic American community and a civil rights activist. He served as the president of the National Council of La Raza from 1974 to 2004 and transformed the organization from a regional advocacy group into a potent national voice for Hispanic communities.

Many returned PCVs made site visits to the towns and villages where they had lived and worked, often hosted by the current PCVs; such a site visit was nostalgic for the former Volunteer and also an exciting historical experience for the local citizens. Rosa and I were very happy to enjoy once again the company of so many friends who shared this collective experience, especially Dave and Anita Kaufmann, Bill and Paula Miller, and Dan and Alicia Mizroch. The men all served as PCVs in the late 1960s, so the celebration also
represented a special homecoming between lifelong friends! Further, we had a joyful reunion with Judy Johnson-Thoms and Victoria Taylor, the PCVs with whom I had served in Monte Plata.

Monte Playa: As a Volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Aaron Williams, left, with his neighborhood buddies and informal language teachers. Photo Courtesy of Aaron S. Williams

Dominican officials, our former counterparts, and many Dominican friends hosted events for Peace Corps participants in the grand style of a “family” reunion. Major Dominican newspapers and broadcast media provided extensive coverage of the celebration. Like many returned PCVs, I had the great pleasure of holding a mini-reunion with my former colleagues from the University Madre y Maestra, many of whom I had not seen since 1970!

We all felt honored to be joined by a special guest, Senator Chris Dodd, a proud returned PCV who served when I did in the Dominican Republic. During his five terms in the U.S. Senate, Chris had always been a great champion of the Peace Corps. For many years, he served as the chairman of the subcommittee responsible for oversight of the Peace Corps. Because he had presided over my confirmation hearing, it was especially gratifying to participate in this homecoming with him.

The planning for the Peace Corps’ 50th-anniversary celebrations, both in the United States and overseas, had begun before my appointment, under the previous director Ron Tschetter. Of course, we were enthusiastic about building upon these efforts. We were determined to hold a worldwide celebration that would highlight this significant landmark in the agency’s history and celebrate the legacy of this American success story — it would be a celebration to remember!

I have often reflected on the warm relationships between the Peace Corps and our host countries. The relationships that PCVs fostered for 50 years were indicative of the power of the organization in pursuing its mission of world peace and friendship. The outpouring of admiration, affection, and respect was something to behold as we continued preparing for these global celebrations. In each location, the country director and their staff created scheduled events representing the Peace Corps’ past and present role in each country, resulting in rich and diverse programs.

Those of us at headquarters planned several special events in Washington, D.C., to highlight and honor the Peace Corps legends who had been Sargent Shriver’s colleagues and to welcome the returned PCVs and other staff community back home. At the same time, returned PCV affinity groups — such as Friends of Kenya, Friends of Paraguay, and so forth—held anniversary activities in every state and in scores of colleges and universities across the United States. The national celebration aimed to demonstrate the organization’s continuing role in American life and history.

Overall, our senior staff traveled to 15 countries, 20 states, and 28 cities to celebrate the 50th anniversary. The Peace Corps senior staff worked to ensure broad representation; Carrie Hessler-Radelet, Stacy Rhodes, and I carefully planned our calendars to maximize our participation in major events in each region of the world and across the United States.

Our trips to visit the Volunteers in the host countries were a great privilege, and in my visits I stressed the importance of the individual and collective service of our PCVs and my personal connection with the work of the modern PCV. What a sight it was to see Volunteers on the front lines, working in microbusiness-support organizations to create new women-owned small businesses, teaching math and science in rural primary schools, or distributing mosquito nets in remote villages to fight malaria under our Stomp Out Malaria program, working in HIV/AIDS clinics, or helping small farmers improve irrigation systems.

The variety of PCV assignments was truly spectacular, from leading young girl empowerment clubs in rural Jordan, to coaching junior achievement classes in Nicaragua, teaching math in rural Tanzania, teaching internet technology in high schools in the Dominican Republic, teaching English as a second language in a girls’ school in rural Thailand, working on improved environmental protection practices in Filipino fishing villages, and helping to advise on improved livestock breeding techniques on farms in Ghana. Though I had once been in similar circumstances as a young PCV, I couldn’t help but be impressed by what I saw.

My colleagues and I had the pleasure of participating in several country celebrations during the 50th anniversary year, and it typically involved the following scenario. Of course, a meeting with the president of the host country and/or another senior government official would be first on the list for a country anniversary celebration. Many of these leaders had worked with or had been taught by Peace Corps Volunteers over decades. We also met with the leaders of the vital counterpart organizations, including community groups, government ministries, and the leading nongovernmental organizations in the country. We visited Volunteers at their worksites to observe their activities and attended a dinner or reception hosted by the U.S. ambassador for the PCVs, local dignitaries, and guests.

Another important aspect of my country visits was broad engagement with the national print, radio, and television press through press conferences, individual interviews, or both. In almost every case, returned PCVs who had served in a particular country participated in the events, often in coordination with the returned PCV affinity groups (e.g., in the case of Tanzania, Paraguay, Kenya, or Thailand), along with current PCVs and their guests. A typical visit for an anniversary event would run two days, and Carrie, Stacy, or I attended as the senior Peace Corps representative for a particular celebration.

Ghana is one of the most prominent nations in West Africa, and Sargent Shriver established the first Peace Corps program there in 1961. Its first president was the famous Kwame Nkrumah, who led the country to independence from Great Britain. Known during the colonial era as the Gold Coast, Ghana was also the location of some of the principal slave-trading forts in West Africa. Stacy Rhodes, Jeff West, and I traveled together to Ghana, where we spent three days in a series of events to celebrate the 50th anniversary in this historic Peace Corps country.

After our first day of courtesy meetings with government officials, local counterpart organizations, Volunteers, and staff, we decided to visit a famous fort. It was a heart-wrenching experience for Stacy and me, brothers in service, to stand before the fortress, built as a trading post with slaves as the primary commodity. We could only look out on the vast Atlantic Ocean through the “door of no return” in the bottom of that castle with sadness, knowing that those poor souls had been ripped from their native land. We felt it was necessary to witness the dungeons where they were held captive and the path they were forced to walk as they boarded the ships in the harbor that would take them to the West Indies or the American colonies, separating them forever from their homeland.

These are experiences not easily comprehended from afar, but they represent a crucial part of the human story that needs to be retold and remembered. Ideally, they set the stage for improving the human condition in the future.

One of the highlights of the trip was our participation in the country’s annual teacher day. I joined the vice president of Ghana, John Mahama, for this special event in an upcountry district capital. Stacy, the country director, Mike Koffman, and I were driven two hours from the capital city of Accra to the district capital. Mike had had a tremendous public service career, first as a Marine Corps officer, then as a founder of a nonprofit organization that provided legal services to the homeless in Boston, and then as an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. After his stint as assistant district attorney, he served as a PCV in the Pacific region, and now we were fortunate to have him as our Ghana country director.

In Ghana, the top teachers were selected each year for special recognition. One of the ten teachers chosen that year was a PCV whose parents were both returned PCVs who had served in Latin America. This national ceremony honors outstanding teachers for their exemplary leadership and work that affected and transformed the lives of the students in their care and the community around them. The overall best teacher receives Ghana’s Most Outstanding Teacher Award and a three-bedroom house. The first runner-up receives a four-by-four pickup truck, and the second runner-up receives a sedan; indeed, a very different approach from how we honor teachers in America. I looked forward to participating in this important ceremony, during which the vice president and I would deliver speeches.

When we arrived at the government house in the district capital, I planned to discuss with the vice president a few points regarding the future of the Peace Corps program in Ghana. However, Vice President Mahama, who subsequently was elected president of Ghana in 2012, was more interested in talking about his experience with a PCV during his youth, and I listened to what he had to say with great interest.

He described how, as a young boy, he had attended a small primary school in rural northern Ghana. There were 50 to 60 boys in a very crowded classroom with very few desks and textbooks. They heard one day that a white American was coming to teach them, and they were anxious about this. They had never seen a white man before in their village, and they didn’t even know if they would be able to understand his language.

When the young American PCV came into the classroom, he looked around the class and said that he was going to teach them science. He then asked them, “Do any of you know how far the sun is from the earth?” The boys all stared at the floor; they didn’t understand why he asked this question or why it was important, but either way, they didn’t know the answer.

That day, for future Vice President Mahama, was a turning point in his life when he saw the possibilities of another world. He also told us about several of his friends from his village school in that same class who had gone on to become scientists or engineers.

The PCV walked up to the front of the classroom, took out a piece of chalk, and wrote down on the blackboard the number ninety-three; he put a comma behind it and then proceeded to write zeros on the front blackboard until he quickly ran out of room, and then he continued to put zeros on the walls of that small room, returning to the ninety-three on the blackboard. Then he exclaimed, in a loud voice, “It’s ninety-three million miles from the earth! Don’t ever forget that!” That day, for future Vice President Mahama, was a turning point in his life when he saw the possibilities of another world. He also told us about several of his friends from his village school in that same class who had gone on to become scientists or engineers.

From the government house, we went on to the stadium to participate in the teacher day festivities. Marching bands and students from all around the area welcomed us and an audience of thousands on the impressive parade grounds of the city. The vice president and I shook hands with and gave the awards to each of the winners, and we had a chance to meet the young PCV who had been selected as one of the winners. It was a long but satisfying day, and I’ll always remember my visit to this historic Peace Corps country.

I have equally vivid memories of traveling to a small village in Ghana, where we visited a young PCV from Kansas, Derek Burke. As I recall, he grew up on a farm, and now, in this remote and arid region of the country, he worked with the local farmers on a tree planting project, helping them to plant thousands of acacia trees. As we slowly walked into the village, we were welcomed by the hypnotic sounds of ceremonial drumming and greeted by more than 200 villagers. I loved seeing the smiling children as we met the village elders and local government officials. We then held a town hall meeting under an enormous baobab tree — a tree large enough to provide shade for all assembled.

As we departed, I was asked to visit with the patriarch of the village, who hadn’t been able to join us due to his failing health. He lived in a small hut on the outskirts of the village. The PCV and I went to his bedside. I can still feel the firm grip of the frail-looking gentleman, who appeared to be in his late 80s. He held my hand as he thanked me through a translator for visiting his village and for the “gift” of the young American PCV whom everyone loved. As I drove away, I thought about the symbolic importance of sending one Volunteer to serve in a remote village in Ghana and how he walked in the steps of those who came 50 years before him, in service to the country and the building of friendship in the name of the United States.

On a spectacularly beautiful day in June 2011, our plane landed in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, after a short stop in Arusha, near Mt. Kilimanjaro, where the majestic mountains loomed large from the airplane window. Esther Benjamin, Elisa Montoya, and Jeff West accompanied me. Dar es Salaam is a name that conjures up visions of Zanzibar and the ancient trading routes between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This nation, formed by the union of Tanganyika (colonial name) and the island of  Zanzibar, has some fifty-five million citizens and is 60 percent Christian and over 30 percent Muslim, with two official languages: Swahili and English.

Tanzania was led into historic independence by the legendary Julius Nyerere, known as the “father of the nation,” who campaigned for Tanganyikan independence from the British Empire.4 Influenced by the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, Nyerere preached nonviolent protest to achieve this aim. His administration pursued decolonization and the “Africanization” of the civil service while promoting unity between indigenous Africans and Asian and European minorities.

The outstanding country program was led by one of our most experienced country directors, Andrea Wojna-Diagne, who received strong support from Alfonso Lenhardt, the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania.

In Tanzania, we started our visit by meeting with President Kikwete and his senior officials. It was a pleasure to learn that the president, as a young elementary school student, had been taught by a Peace Corps Volunteer. He had a very positive view of the Peace Corps, and he recognized its importance to the relationship between the United States and his country.

We started our visit by meeting with President Kikwete and his senior officials. It was a pleasure to learn that the president, as a young elementary school student, had been taught by a Peace Corps volunteer. He had a very positive view of the Peace Corps, and he recognized its importance to the relationship between the United States and his country.

We went upcountry to visit a volunteer who was a high school math teacher in a very remote part of Tanzania. In many places in the developing world, it’s challenging to find and hire science and math teachers for rural communities, who are desperately needed, as without these subjects, the students in this region would not be able to complete the coursework required to take the qualifying exams for university applications. The school principal and our PCV were very proud of the role he played in this school and of the astronomy program he created to introduce his students to this area of science.

Upon our return to Dar, we had the pleasure of attending a lovely dinner hosted by the ambassador and participating in a fiftieth-anniversary gala, organized by Peace Corps staff and the PCVs. Due to a touch of serendipity, there happened to be several Peace Corps volunteers in Tanzania who were graduates of performing arts programs in universities and colleges across the United States. They created, planned, rehearsed, and staged a magnificent performance about the history of the Peace Corps in Tanzania. The audience included current PCVs, returned volunteers, Tanzanian government officials, Peace Corps partners, and special guests. From my humble viewpoint, it was a Broadway-caliber stage performance. It included concert singing, highly skilled theatrical performances, original music scores by soloist performers, and poetry readings as odes to Tanzanian–U.S. friendship. There we were, on the beautiful lawn and garden grounds of the U.S. Embassy, being entertained by this incredibly talented group of volunteers who expressed their love for Tanzania in the most heartfelt, dramatic fashion possible.

In November of 2011, my team and I traveled to the Philippines to celebrate the joint fiftieth anniversary of USAID and the Peace Corps. My colleagues Elisa Montoya, Esther Benjamin, and Jeff West accompanied me on this trip. As in Thailand, Ghana, and Tanzania, the Peace Corps program in the Philippines was legendary, again launched by Sargent Shriver nearly fifty years earlier.

Benigno Aquino III was the son of prominent political leaders Benigno Aquino Jr. and Corazon Aquino, the former president of the Philippines.5 President Aquino was a strong supporter of the Peace Corps. In his youth, he had become friends with several PCVs in his hometown and had met many PCVs during his mother’s presidency.

Our ambassador, Harry Thomas, a distinguished veteran diplomat, had served as the head of the Foreign Service as director-general. USAID mission director Gloria Steele was also a veteran USAID officer and former colleague who had held several senior positions at headquarters. She had the honor of being the first Filipina American to serve in this position. Needless to say, Gloria was well known throughout the country and highly regarded across the Philippines. Our terrific country director, Denny Robertson, represented the Peace Corps.

The president graciously hosted a luncheon for our group in the historic Malacañang Palace, his official residence and principal workplace— the White House of the Philippines. Many meetings between Filipino and U.S. government officials have taken place there over the years of the countries’ bilateral relationship. We had a delightful, wide-ranging conversation with the president and his staff in which he made clear his great appreciation for PCVs’ years of service. He was pleased that we were there to celebrate the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of this highly respected American organization.

Excerpt adapted from A Life Unimagined: The Rewards of Mission-Driven Service in the Peace Corps and Beyond by Aaron S. Williams with Deb Childs. © 2021 University of Wisconsin-Madison International Division

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

By Patrick Chura

SUNY Press

Reviewed by Marnie Mueller 

In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and suffered as a result of their beliefs and actions. In this biography he brings to light, as Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America — a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.

Michael Gold was born in a tenement in 1893 as Itzok Isaac Granich (aka Irwin Granich), and he later wrote: “It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars. The sky above the airshafts was all my sky, and the voices of the tenement neighbors in the airshaft were the voices of all my world. There in my suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man.”

In order to become “Michael Gold” the author, Irwin Granich had to break with that old culture. Chura describes how it felt like suicide for Gold to separate himself from his parents and their assimilationist desires for prosperity and choose his own path, his “synthesis for life,” as an author and activist. This was his talent and his undoing. His major literary gift to the American canon was Jews without Money in 1930, an autobiographical proletarian novel about growing up in that world. It was enormously successful and translated into over a dozen languages. His only novel, it served as a model for political fiction and the touchstone and source of strength for his own critical writing and editorial influence in progressive and Marxist periodicals.

Gold’s strong views on political literature gained followers, but as time went on, the strength and some would say rigidity of his beliefs undercut his standing in that intellectual world. Chura doesn’t shrink from showing how Gold could turn against his fellow authors—even those whose work he had lauded on first encounter, like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, whom he later determined didn’t live up to his notions of true proletarian and anti-racist writing. During the McCarthy Era, they retreated to safer ground; Gold deemed them mere visitors to the life of the poor and underprivileged. 

This biography brings to light, as Michael Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America — a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.

In Faulkner’s case, Gold’s aggrievement seems especially justified. In 1956, when Autherine Lucy attempted to integrate the University of Alabama, Faulkner the liberal Southerner walked back his support of Black Americans, retreating to a stance against “forced integration,” saying he would join with “that embattled white minority who are our blood and kin.” Shocked, Gold responded, “This surely is thinking with the blood … the sort of ‘thinking’ that loomed large in Nazi ideology, and has long kept the South in pauperism.” 

In this stand, Gold linked racism, anti-Semitism, capitalism, and classism as the greatest of political evils. Gold’s criticism and opinion pieces also foretold of a progressive rigidity in promulgating what is correct and non-correct in proletariat storytelling, morphing into our current conundrum of demanding authenticity of class and racial credentials.

Nearer to my own life and family was the support Gold gave to the cooperative movement, which was thought of as a subversive, socialist concept in the 1930s and 1940s. My father, an economist, was a strong believer in and promulgator of co-ops as giving an economic power base for the “little guy” against the corporate state. So it was with great surprise that upon entering the Peace Corps I found myself in Puerto Rico in 1963 with a group training to work in Ecuador as specialists in co-operative movement credit unions. Gold might have been even more astonished to learn that this once-thought radical movement was being used in the fight against Communist inroads in Latin America.

My parents became an example of those progressive commitments when they decided to spend their honeymoon and first year of marriage in 1938 working in the Farm Security camp which John Steinbeck used as research for The Grapes of Wrath. They later went to work in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security Camp to try to make a horrific situation tolerable for those who had been imprisoned there. But they, along with many progressives of their generation, were punished during the McCarthy period and accused of being Communists, resulting in their loss of livelihood and vocation.

Signing up for the Peace Corps brought it home to me. I remember my father’s distress when the FBI walked from house to house in our neighborhood asking about our family, in preparation for deciding whether the Peace Corps would accept my application for service. My father feared that the attacks on him during the McCarthy witch hunts would ruin my possibility of following my dream. It’s a tribute to the Peace Corps they judged me solely on my accomplishments.

In vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America” — one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community. 

In addition to a mastery of research, synthesis, analysis, compassion, and fluid prose in vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America” — one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community. 

Patrick Chura himself served as a Volunteer in Lithuania 1992–94 and is a professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural studies. In introducing Gold’s family life into the narrative, Chura lets the reader see that political activists of that time — like Gold and like my parents — loved their children and tried to protect us, with as much commitment as they invested in making our country a better place for all Americans.

This review originally appeared on Peace Corps Worldwide and appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine. 

Marnie Mueller served as a Volunteer in Ecuador 1963–65. She is the author of three novels, including The Climate of the Country, which takes place in the Tule Lake Japanese American Internment Camp in Northern California.

Coral Reef Curiosities

INTRIGUE, DECEPTION AND WONDER ON THE REEF AND BEYOND

By Chuck Weikert

Dayton Publishing

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

Chuck Weikert served as a Volunteer in the Kingdom of Tonga 1977–79. He recounts a snorkeling excursion to the windward side. “The reef opened up in a virtual explosion of colors, textures, and life that stretched into the deep blue beyond. It was mind boggling!”

So begins a love affair with the undersea world — captured here in 25 chapters tracing the lives of creatures that inhabit coral reefs, and weaving in the history of humans’ interaction and impact. Weikert went on to work with the National Park Service — including 13 years at Virgin Islands National Park on the island of St. John, where he served as chief of interpretation.

Brain coral hideout: a spotjaw blenny (Acanthemblemaria rivasi) near Bocas del Toro, Panama. Photo by iStock

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine. Story updated September 9, 2022.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

Letters, emails, LinkedIn and Instagram comments, Facebook posts, tweets, and other comments. We’re happy to continue the conversation here and our social media platforms. One way to write us: worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org

Cover to Cover

I want to congratulate you and the whole NPCA team for producing an outstanding magazine. Yesterday I read through the two most recent issues cover to cover and found the content to be rich and very informative. You should be proud of the role that WorldView plays in supporting and connecting the Peace Corps community.

Tony Barclay
Kenya 1968–70, NPCA Board Chair 2011–15

I have been reading your magazine for a while. I thought your last magazine was just wonderful — as were many before that — and want to congratulate you.

Kathleen Harnig
Bulgaria 1998–2000, Liberia 2013–14

You should be proud of the role that WorldView plays in supporting and connecting the Peace Corps community.

Congratulations on your special books edition. I found the quiet time to read this issue (as I try to read most issues of WorldView) from cover to cover. Your page 11 article on Ukraine is powerful and personal. I will be sharing it with a Ukrainian friend who is a former choir director at UC Berkeley and organized two concerts of Ukrainian religious and folk music to raise funds for the country of her origins. One was hosted here at our parish; the other at the concert hall on campus. 

I also need to thank you for the Book Locker and your extraordinary overviews of the books you reviewed. I joined Peace Corps (India 30, 1966–68) at the height of the idealism and call to service that brought PC into existence and led to its times of great success and accomplishment. But as transformative as the experience was for me, and as consequential as I think it was for some of the people with whom we worked, I have to see it as a small contribution to the larger movement of a nation and its people.  

I was part of a series of Peace Corps groups that were sent to Andhra Pradesh in south India to help high school science teachers teach using an investigative approach in place of the old British “learn by rote” Cambridge exam approach. Since commercial laboratory equipment was expensive and therefore unavailable to small village level schools, we taught ways of improvising laboratory apparatus using materials available in any village setting.

The impact of this effort is impossible to measure concretely, but in the years following our service, Andhra went from scoring very low on the Indian National Science test to being among the highest in India, I’ve been told. Whatever the contribution of Peace Corps, it was the Indians who took the resources that were made available to them and turned them into something transformative. 

The cover line of the most recent edition of WorldView, “The Stories We Tell,” fits well with my own embrace of my PC experience. We went to India and did what we were invited to do, and things changed. We may have been only a small part of the cause, but change definitely happened in a remarkably good way, and so we rejoice with and for the people we served.

Steve Bossi
India 1966–68

Great job on the latest PC mag. Especially liked all the books.   

Peter von Mertens
Nepal VIII (1966–68)

The Book Locker and the Third Goal

During the first few years of the Peace Corps, Volunteers were given book lockers. Mine included a copy of War and Peace, which I still have — and still have not read. Among books in the lockers were Animal Farm, Learning English, the James Beard Cookbook, Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, and The Wonderful World of Peanuts by Charles Schultz. So it is fitting that at the Ohio State University we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Peace Corps this spring in the Jean and Charles Schultz Lecture Hall.

In the early 1960s, a group of Peace Corps parents in Columbus established the Columbus Peace Corps Service Council — either the first or second one in the U.S. In part, their purpose was to help fulfill the third goal of the Peace Corps: To help promote a better understanding among Americans of other peoples of the world. To do this, they set about informing the community about Peace Corps through news stories, booths at fairs, festivals and conferences, TV interviews, and exhibits at the OSU library, among many other activities.

But I’ve always thought another reason for those first parent-organized service councils was to try to understand where their children had gone and what exactly they were doing there. As a result of those first service councils, similar groups were formed in every state. Today there are four affiliate groups of the National Peace Corps Association in Ohio.

For the public, for those considering joining the Peace Corps, and even for returned Volunteers, the Third Goal has always been a bit of an afterthought. It’s more fun to talk about what we did instead of what we need to do now to strengthen, promote, and expand the Peace Corps. Whether you have just been accepted, if you’ve recently returned, or if you’ve been home a few years: It is your voice that will keep Peace Corps alive and keep Volunteers in the field.

Wallis Harsch
Panama 1966–68

The Peace Corps and Rotary International

In the special 60th anniversary edition of WorldView, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, co-author with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How American Came together a Century Ago and How We can Do It Again, posits a policy prescription for the administration “that would help us move to an ‘upswing’ (a return to the ‘we’ of service to others, vs. the ‘I’ of self-service that has prevailed since the 1960s). National Service is my absolute go-to answer.” As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and Rotarian for 27 years, I can attest that we already have vibrant national and international service organizations.

There have been many calls for a national service; AmeriCorps, the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps, has been a partial answer. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of international forces in Afghanistan and head of the “Serve America. Together.” campaign, called on the president to invest in universal national service for 1 million young Americans annually as “the most important strategy we can implement to ensure the strength and security of our nation.” But the foremost national and international service organization is Rotary International, dedicated to the motto “Service Above Self.”

As of 2006, Rotary had more than 1.4 million members in over 36,000 clubs among 200 countries and geographical areas. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkey and have been able to continue my community development work as a Rotarian; I have been involved in countless local community projects and international projects, such as in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo assisting in its recovery from the various civil wars it suffered. More important, I am a founding board member of Partnering For Peace, an NPCA affiliate that has joined with the Peace Corps to support Peace Corps projects worldwide. That is a natural partnership of like minds and hearts, committed to both national and international service. It is time to acknowledge Rotary International’s role in both foreign and domestic public service for its growth and vitality. It is a testament to how well Rotarians and the Peace Corps Community are already working together. I already see this “upswing” happening for millions worldwide, as well as in the U.S.

Harlan Green
Turkey 1964–66

CORRECTION: Our Words

In the print edition, the review of On Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes (p. 22) included a brief excerpt in italics with one extra line in italics at the end: “There is no comforting answer to that.” Those were our words, not hers. Sorry about that.

WRITE US: worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org

Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

By Laurence Leamer

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

“For years, Truman Capote had been proudly telling anyone within hearing that he was writing ‘the greatest novel of the age,’” begins Laurence Leamer’s latest biography, a tale of the literati and glitterati. Capote’s book “was about a group of the richest, most elegant women in the world. They were fictional, of course … but everyone knew these characters were based on his closest friends, the coterie of gorgeous, witty, and fabulously rich women he called his ‘swans.’” 

Following publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, Capote was a writer of renown, feted and admired. Among those he befriended and who took him into their confidence: Barbara “Babe” Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C.Z. Guest, and Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister). But Capote also suffered serious writer’s block, never completing his magnum opus, Answered Prayers, that he was sure would deserve a place beside Proust and Wharton. He only managed to complete and publish a few chapters in Esquire in 1975. When Capote’s authorized biographer, Gerald Clark, read the excerpt pre-publication, he was alarmed that the women would recognized themselves immediately. “Naaah, they’re too dumb,” Capote told Clark. “They won’t know who they are.”

Laurence Leamer has written here a story of betrayal. And it’s a story of failure — a swan song not at all like the one Capote intended — by a great American writer who found “nothing in love was too bizarre for his scrutiny.”

Bestselling author Leamer has indeed written here a story of betrayal. And it’s a story of failure — a swan song not at all like the one Capote intended — by a great American writer who found “nothing in love was too bizarre for his scrutiny.” 

Leamer himself served as a Volunteer in Nepal 1965–67, “where I had a remote placement two days walk from a road,” as he told Peace Corps Worldwide. Leamer went on to cover the war in Bangladesh for Harper’s, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, Playboy, and elsewhere. He drew on his knowledge of Nepal for Ascent: The Spiritual and Physical Quest of Legendary Mountaineer Willi Unsoeld. But he has no doubt become best known for tales of the wealthy and powerful in book form that include Make-Believe: The Life of Nancy and Ronald Reagan; a trilogy on the Kennedys; Fantastic, a biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Madness Under the Royal Palms, telling the secrets and scandals of South Florida. A deeper dive into one of that area’s most famous denizens appeared in 2019 — Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace — a book, Leamer says, “written with all I know about Palm Beach after living there for a quarter-century and all I know about politics and human personality after a lifetime as a writer.”

Over the years, Leamer has also turned his sights on projects that have had a profound effect on the wider world. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, earned a place on must-reads lists by Oprah Winfrey and Tavis Smiley. For The Price of Justice, he went undercover to work in a West Virginia coal mine and told the story of two lawyers’ struggle against Don Blankenship, “the most powerful coal baron in American history. Blankenship was indicted and sent to prison,” Leamer notes. “People in West Virginia will tell you it would not have happened without The Price of Justice.” 

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Steven Boyd Saum is editor of WorldView.

Land, The State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan

By Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili

Cambridge University Press

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

Could it all have gone differently in Afghanistan? That was the premise for a conversation last September with Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili about her recently published book, Land, The State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan. Surveys, fieldwork, and historical analysis point to this conclusion, among others: Imposing Western-style institutions is not a panacea. Rather, as Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili distilled in another conversation: “It wasn’t because Afghan social norms don’t support democracy. They do. And Afghans understood darn well what they were supposed to have. But they never even got the minimum of what they were promised in the constitution.” 

“It wasn’t because Afghan social norms don’t support democracy. They do. And Afghans understood darn well what they were supposed to have. But they never even got the minimum of what they were promised in the constitution.” 

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Samarqand, Uzbekistan, 1997–99. She is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (2016).

Her involvement with Afghanistan is far from only academic. In August 2021, she was at the center of efforts at University of Pittsburgh to coordinate work by dozens of volunteers to assist refugees fleeing Afghanistan as the U.S. withdrew.

This review appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

POETRY SKETCHES

A PEACE CORPS MEMOIR

By Eldon Katter

Peace Corps Writers

Reviewed by Kathleen Coskran

Eldon Katter sketches with images and words alike. He had the foresight to chronicle his time with the first group of Peace Corps Volunteers in Ethiopia (1962–64) through short poems and drawings — both his and his students’. He had the fortune to be assigned to teach in Harar, Ethiopia — one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the only walled city in Ethiopia, and now a World Heritage Site.

I don’t think many subsequent Volunteers received an engraved invitation from His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, but Katter did: for a dinner at the Messerate Palace on October 13, 1962, featuring French wine and Italian pastries.

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine. It is excerpted from a review that originally appeared on Peace Corps Worldwide.

Kathleen Coskran served as a Volunteer in Ethiopia 1965–67.

A Few Minor Adjustments

TWO YEARS IN AFGHANISTAN: A PEACE CORPS ODYSSEY 

By Elana Hohl

Independently Published

Reviewed by Jordan Simmons

Before Elana Hohl and her husband, Mike, traveled to Afghanistan to serve with the Peace Corps 1971–73, she had only been beyond her native Midwest a handful of times. The journey filled her with constant amazement — at the smells and tastes of foods, the splendor and beauty of the land in which she found herself. That includes her first trip north with an Afghan friend, Faiz, to the Salaang Pass in the heart of the Hindu Kush Mountains — and later to see the enormous statues of Buddha in Bamiyan. The overall experience served up a consistent need for “minor adjustments” — from navigating lengthy greetings, learning differing attitudes toward time, and developing skills at haggling over the price of goods. They learned to understand the importance of the camel, the imperative to save face, the attitude of “making it work” in marriage, the intricacies of hospitality culture, and the vast historical influences of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Islam.

There are the absurd moments as well. Canned cheese, which was provided by UNICEF to alleviate starvation, proves too far a stretch for many Afghans from their dietary customs; the stuff gets resold to foreigners at a discount. Over two years of living with everyday reality in Afghanistan, Hohl comes to have a more nuanced understanding of the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of foreign relief efforts.

There is also an Afghanistan and Peace Corps epilogue to this story. “Our son Chad has spent 20 years in the Army and has seen seven deployments — two of them in Afghanistan,” Hohl writes. “Aaron was a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, working in an agroforestry project. He later earned his Ph.D. in forestry. Our daughter Sarah also joined the Peace Corps and was stationed in a remote village in southeastern Senegal working as a public health Volunteer. She subsequently worked for a non-government organization in Kenya for three years and now holds a Ph.D. in public health.” 

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Jordan Simmons is an intern with WorldView. He is a studying at Washington University in St. Louis.

Afghanistan at a Time of Peace

By Robin Varnum

Peace Corps Writers

Reviewed by Jordan Simmons

Friends en route to a provincial school. Photo courtesy Robin Varnum

Afghanistan at a Time of Peace traces Robin Varnum’s years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, 1971–73. Varnum chronicles her journey into learning the place she came to call home: adapting to the chilly weather in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, and understanding why she and other foreigners are mocked as “Mister Kachaloo” (literally, “Mr. Potato” in Dari), and traversing the length and breadth of the country — from Jalalabad to Mazar-i-sharif.

As a Volunteer she taught English to girls in grades 8–12 at Lycée Jahan Malika, the only girls school in the province. Friendships are at the center of her story — hosting dinners, trading stories, sharing wine. While navigating the male-dominated Afghan society she also does her best to build confidence in the girls she teaches, so that they might become the leaders of tomorrow. But the tomorrow that arrived was very different than the one Varnum imagined.

On July 17, 1973, near the end of Varnum’s service, her then-husband Mark, with whom she served as a Volunteer, “came home from Lycée Sanai after giving his last exam and told me there had been a coup d’état at 5:00 that morning and Afghanistan was now a republic. Mohammad Daoud Khan, a cousin of King Zahir Shah, had deposed his cousin and taken over as president. Mark said everything seemed normal at school and in the town. Nobody seemed upset.”

Outside a village school: Anwar, seated, served as a teacher and principal and worked with follow Volunteer Juris Zagarins. Photo by Juris Zagarins

Five years later, Daoud was overthrown and assassinated in the so-called Saur Revolution of April 1978, with factions of the Afghan communist party taking power. The U.S. Ambassador was kidnaped in 1979 and the Peace Corps program shuttered. And a cycle of suffering that has lasted generations began.

Varnum went on to teach at American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts, retiring as professor emerita. 
 

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Jordan Simmons is an intern with WorldView. He is a studying at Washington University in St. Louis.

Art Hiding in New York

AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO THE CITY’S SECRET MASTERPIECES

By Lori Zimmer | Illustrated by Maria Krasinski

Running Press

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

In this compendium of delight, illustrator Maria Krasinski brings playful color and a lightness of touch to an exploration of art and artists whose work populates dedicated spaces and so much more in Manhattan. She teams up with writer Lori Zimmer to traverse unexpected places and limn faces of the artists.

Works range from Alexander Calder’s “Janey Waney” in Gramercy Park to Francoise Schein’s “Subway Map Floating on a New York Sidewalk” in Soho to Leo Villareal’s ceiling installation “Hive” in the subway, at Bleecker and Lafayette. Chapters invite you to “Dine Amongst the Masters,” and to discover “Artists’ Homes and Haunts” and “Architectural Interventions.”

Andy Warhol’s Town House and Cats. He and his mother once lived here with 25 felines — all named Sam. Illustration by Maria Krasinski

Krasinski served as a Volunteer in Georgia 2017–18 and is now managing director for News Decoder, a global news service and education startup for youth that is based in Paris. That’s where her fans can head later this fall, when Art Hiding in Paris is due out.

Does Krasinski’s name ring a buzzer — er bell? “You might have seen me get steamrolled by Amy Schneider on Jeopardy!” she says. Indeed, she took second in her appearance on the game show in 2022. 

This review appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

Finding Refuge

REAL-LIFE IMMIGRATION STORIES FROM YOUNG PEOPLE

By Victorya Rouse

Zest Books

Reviewed by Nathalie Vadnais

In the Newcomers Center at Ferris High School in Spokane, Washington, Victorya Rouse teaches immigrants from all over the world how to speak English. It’s work she has done for three decades, after she served as an education Volunteer with the Peace Corps in eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) 1981–84. For Finding Refuge, she has put together firsthand accounts of kids’ and teenagers’ experiences — some recounted many years later — to help young readers understand war, conflict, and what it means to be a refugee.

Many young refugees contributed memories of their lives before, during, and after evacuation of their home often due to political tension or aggressive conflict. Among the contributors: Fedja Zahirovic, who fled war in Bosnia in the 1990s; and Abdulrazik Mohamed, who fled the civil war in Sudan and, after years in refugee camps, arrived in Spokane in 2012. Other contributors were refugees from Libya and Syria, Iraq and Mexico, Moldova and Ukraine.

“The experiences that brought them here,” Rouse writes, “to my classroom—reflect the ongoing realities faced by refugees around the world.”

EXCERPT:

Fedja from Bosnia and Herzegovina, entered the U.S. in 1995

We were only able to bring clothes, some family photos, and documents — and I brought a few cassettes with my favorite music. My mom kept telling me to leave things. “We are only taking our clothes and toiletries.” It was like going on vacation, only this time I was bringing a lot more clothes. I couldn’t bring my guitar, piano, or record collection. My bike had already been stolen. I was leaving my few remaining friends and all of my family. My grandmother was staying behind to keep the apartment from being taken away by the refugees and to keep our cabin from being seized by the military. I felt like I would never get to see any of it again. I was right.

My grandmother was staying behind to keep the apartment from being taken away by the refugees and to keep our cabin from being seized by the military. I felt like I would never get to see any of it again. I was right.

Epilogue: Life was difficult for a long time, but my life is good now, and I try to give back and to help people whenever I can. My mother and grandmother live in Portland, near enough that I can see them often. I am married now. My wife has her degree in early childhood education. I do in-home care for people with developmental disabilities as I near completion of my B.A. in musicology and ethnomusicology. My dream is to get an M.A. in music education and to start my own music program for children who are immigrants, who are high risk, or who have learning disabilities—in other words, those who often don’t have the access or privilege to enroll in regular music programs. 

EXCERPT:

Trang from Viet Nam, entered the U.S. in 1975

On the ship, women and children were being sent to the upper deck, and the men to the lower deck. Somehow, on that huge ship, we all found each other. It was a miracle: The whole family — all ten of us children and both parents — made it onto that ship. So few families made it out together.

People were crowded together like sardines. We couldn’t even lie down. We didn’t have room to move. The ship took us to the Philippines, but on the way, we ran out of food and water. I was so hungry and thirsty. Someone told us to tap sea water on our lips. We couldn’t drink the sea water, but we could make our lips damp.

“On the ship, women and children were being sent to the upper deck, and the men to the lower deck. Somehow, on that huge ship, we all found each other. It was a miracle: The whole family — all ten of us children and both parents — made it onto that ship.”

In the Philippines, we were given military C-rations. I had peanut butter for the first time. Peanut butter and crackers were so good. There was cheese too. It was so good to eat again. There we were transferred to an even bigger ship and taken to Guam. There were not enough toilets on the ship, so they built an outhouse over the rail. It was so scary to look down and see the ocean!

Epilogue: What I would like people to know about refugees is how grateful we are to have the chance to have a life. The English language is hard. It is not easy to come to a new country and learn a whole new language and way of life, but we are grateful for what we have been given, for the help we have received.

My husband and I have a comfortable life. We have the basics, everything we really need. We are grateful for our lives here in the United States, for having a roof over our heads, food to eat, and children we are proud of. That is what a successful life is to me. Our children have grown up healthy and happy, with good careers. Now my dream is to retire healthy so I can spend time with our grandchildren.

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Nathalie Vadnais is an intern with WorldView. She is completing a degree in international studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

DEMO | Poems

By Charlie Smith

W.W. Norton

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

Early on in Charlie Smith’s recent collection comes the poem “Samsara,” lines of joy and memory and death and rebirth. How it begins: “The ocean, uncomfortable with itself, bangs and slurs, / mixing flavors, holding its own against infinity, scarred with ice.” Before it ends, he assesses, “I’ve caught up lately on everything / but time.”

In between, the poem traverses continents and piano concertos, seasons and marriages, plum flowers and the first pear blossoms. The images summoned are in a voice at once exuberant and mournful. Of a wife who once stood “wrapped in a red Navajo blanket / by the doorway of an old hogan on the rez” he laments: “She’s gone now / into the far lands of chaos; sun-shaped molecules, scent of sweet bay.”

Two decades ago, David Kirby wrote for The New York Times that here is a poet who reminds us “that we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief.” Carry forward that sentiment into Demo — Smith’s ninth collection of poetry. He has also published eight novels and a book of novellas.

Originally from Moultrie, Georgia, Smith served with the Peace Corps in Micronesia 1968–70. His debut collection, Red Roads, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published in 1987. Five of his books have been named Notable Book of the Year or Editor’s Choice by The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, among many other publications.

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

The Boy with Four Names

By Doris Rubenstein

IUniverse

Reviewed by Nathalie Vadnais

In Germany in 1935, just after the Nuremberg Laws were passed, a young Jewish man named Abie is confronted by Nazi soldiers while walking with his Aryan girlfriend in public. In self-defense, Abie attacks one soldier and, believing him dead, flees to relatives in Holland. They equip him with their son’s identification and he takes a train to Milan, where he finds an old friend — and refuge. 

So begins Doris Rubenstein’s historical novel The Boy with Four Names. In the story, Abie meets a young Jewish woman in Italy and, together, they flee — thanks in part to some forged documents courtesy of the Olivetti family of typewriter fame. They try their luck in Mexico, Argentina, and finally Ecuador. There they are welcomed as refugees and earn citizenship while working in agriculture. A son is born — Enrico, the Italian version of Heinrich, in tribute to poet Heinrich Heine. Enrico grows up in an unstable world and adopts four different names to assimilate into different cultures and escape dangers.

This is a novel written for young adults, Rubenstein says, but she hopes it will strike a chord with older adults, too. One reason: There is a real boy with four names — Enrique Cohen, whose family fled Europe when he was a toddler and wound up in Ecuador.

This is a novel written for young adults, Rubenstein says, but she hopes it will strike a chord with older adults, too. One reason: There is a real boy with four names — Enrique Cohen, whose family fled Europe when he was a toddler and wound up in Ecuador. Rubenstein served with the Peace Corps in Ecuador 1971–73, though she had actually met Enrique before that; he attended University of Michigan, met Rubenstein’s cousin, they wed, and together returned to Ecuador. When Doris Rubenstein would visit Quito during her Peace Corps service, she would stay with the Cohens. “I’ve been back for visits five or six times over the past 48 years,” she told interviewer Donald Levin. “I was always curious about their story, but they really didn’t talk about it much. I got snippets here and there, but nothing close to a narrative.”

Jewish farmers in Ecuador: a scene Enrique might have known. Photo courtesy Jewish Refugee Assistance Library

That changed in 2013, when Rubenstein was invited to an event at the synagogue in Quito. “My Jewish (and non-Jewish) friends in the States were amazed to learn that there are Jews living in Ecuador, some for four generations now,” she told Levin. “Their exposure to Holocaust stories pointed toward those who fled to the U.S. or Canada, or Israel. Maybe some of our generation knew that Jews had gone to Argentina because of the Eichmann trial. But Ecuador? As for teens, the only ‘teen’ story they seem to know of is Anne Frank’s, and that’s got a pretty sad ending. I thought that a different story directed at them—like Enrique’s life—would shed new light on the lives of Holocaust survivors.”

Rubenstein is the author of five previous books and considers herself primarily a writer of nonfiction. She sat down for an extended interview with Enrique Cohen in 2019. “His wife sat in on it, and after it was over, she said that she’d never heard most of the stories he told,” Rubenstein says, “and they’d been married over 50 years at that time!” 

This review appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.

Nathalie Vadnais is an intern with WorldView. She is completing a degree in international studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.