Tag: memoir
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Maybe Not so Mediocre
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An author revisits a languishing biographical sketch, finishes it, and wins a Golden Nib in the Virginia Writers Club statewide nonfiction category.
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Negotiating the Peace Corps into China
No communist country had hosted a Peace Corps program until Peter Tomsen negotiated a role for Volunteers in China, an objective that would take over a decade to fulfill
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Publication Announcement
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From the first generation of Peace Corps Volunteers emerged 50 future ambassadors, protagonists in some of our nation’s most dramatic events over the last 65 years.
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A Literary Prize
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The small gods visit us softly. So soft, sometimes, it’s possible we miss their presence altogether. Two weeks passed before I noted the happy trespass of one such deity through my recent gloom. The first inkling appeared last week, good news arriving to my in-box from another writer, a former professor, writing mentor, and current…
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Where Fact Meets Fiction
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My personal journeys work best as parody. I am a very unserious traveler. I board the train for the potato cutlet, not the arrival in Bangaluru.
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Sex Ed: Anne Frank in Africa
Without telling us the punchlines, Dutch researchers announced this week the discovery of four dirty jokes papered over in Anne Frank’s diary. I taught the diary as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi two decades ago, curious from the start why it was on the curriculum. My students faced a lifetime of grinding poverty, endemic…
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Review–Memoir from Paraguay
Latest review posted at Peace Corps Worldwide, home for Peace Corps-affiliated writers who publish stories from around the world. Mark Salvatore writes simple, declarative sentences. His Peace Corps memoir, Shade of the Paraiso, is stripped to fact and detail, observation and truth. Even its replication of time — passing slowly at first, building inexorably over months,…
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Expeditionary Diplomacy
The otherwise respectable American Diplomacy, which publishes ‘Foreign Service Despatches and Periodic Reports on U.S. Foreign Policy,’ included my review of of Ambassador James R. Bullington’s Foreign Service Memoir, The Road Less Traveled, in the latest lineup. The memoir recounts a career that started in expeditionary diplomacy for the State Department during the U.S. military…
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Heroes In Literature
Among the acknowledgements listed back of my debut novel is Barry H. Leeds, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at CCSU. Hemingway, Mailer, Kesey—these were the writers Dr. Leeds expounded to us, models who wrote tough, lean sentences and big, enduring books. I worked like hell to write the strong prose Dr. Leeds demanded in his…
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Review: Shattered Glass–The Story of a Marine Embassy Guard
I picked up Greg Matos’ Shattered Glass—The Story of a Marine Embassy Guard with a narrow purpose. I wanted to read about the December 2004 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I wanted to know what it felt like to be the Marine standing Post when five heavily armed terrorists stormed our compound, killing…
Ben East Books 