Mapping a Life
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...
Travels and Ghosts: The 2022 Peace Corps Writers Awards
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...
An Accidental Stumble
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...
Intimate and Lyrical Poetry by Ukrainian Poet Natalka Bilotserkivets. Her Work Has a New Resonance and Urgency.
Eccentric Days Of Hope And Sorrow By Natalka Bilotserkivets Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky Lost Horse Press Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Prologue to this collection spanning four decades is the poem “ДІТИ,” or “Children.” It’s a word that readers have seen in photos from Ukraine scores of times since February. Usually it is rendered in Russian, for the benefit of the invaders. Spray-painted on gates to a yard in a village house. In pen on a sign taped to the inside window of a car fleeing rocket fire and shelling. Spelled out in enormous letters...
A Biography of Writer Michael Gold Traces an Anti-Democratic Thread in American Life
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...
Ten Hidden Heroes
A conversation with author Mark K. Shriver By Steven Boyd Saum Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark K. Shriver teamed up with illustrator Laura Watson on 10 Hidden Heroes, published by Loyola Press, which aims to help children develop counting skills while learning ways to make the world a better place. It shows how acts of kindness and generosity can be found all around us. Shriver has served as president of Save the Children Action Network and now leads Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School in Maryland as its first lay president. He is the author of Pilgrimage: My Search for the...
His Family Fled the Nazis. In Ecuador, He Grows up Changing Names and Identities to Navigate an Uncertain Fate.
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...
Giving Voice to Refugees: Firsthand Accounts from Children and Teenagers — Some Many Years Later
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...
The Swan Song that Truman Capote Did Not Intend to Write
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...
Andy Warhol’s Cats, a Floating Subway Map, and More NYC Delights
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...