Bibliography by Author

MacKinnon, Colin (Iran, 1965–67).

The Contractor: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 2009. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2008034060

Publisher’s description: “Rick Behringer is an outside contractor working for the CIA. By day, he provides communications security for small businesses and government offices. In the shadows, Rick’s a spy who is in a desperate struggle to take down a terrorist mastermind with the means to unleash hell on Earth.”

Morning Spy, Evening Spy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2006040590

Publisher’s description: “CIA officer Paul Patterson races to track down Kareem, a former Afghan resistance fighter who has become an al-Qaeda and Taliban operative, in a novel about the search for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in the months prior to September 11th…. [T]his gripping and fast-paced novel, written by the author praised by The New Yorker for capturing “the le Carré; manner,” inspired in part by The 9/11 Report, captures the world of the CIA and the terrorists with the intensity John le Carré; brought to the Cold War.”

Magnarella, Paul J. (Turkey, 1963–65).

Tradition and Change in a Turkish Town. Cambridge: Schenkman: New York: John Wiley, 1974 (revised ed. Schenkman, 1981). Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/74014927

Subject: The book is an expansion of the author’s Harvard University dissertation thesis.

Maren, Michael (Kenya, 1977–80).

The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. New York: Free Press, 1997. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/96041168

Publisher’s description: “Michael Maren has spent much of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist…. He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations. And it is the last refuge of Western colonialism.”

Martin, Bradley K. (Thailand, 1965–67).

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2004056158

Publisher’s description: “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea’s two ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Lifting North Korea’s curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society that, to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of megalomaniacs.”

Maskarinec, Gregory G. (Nepal, 1979–81).

The Rulings of the Night: An Ethnography of Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/94023024

Publisher’s description: “It is impossible to discuss what shamans are and what they do, contends Gregory G. Maskarinec, without knowing what shamans say. When Maskarinec took an interest in shaman rituals on his first visit to Nepal, he was told by many Nepalis and Westerners that the shamans he had encountered in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal engaged in "meaningless mumblings." But in the course of several years of fieldwork he learned from the shamans that both their long, publicly chanted rituals and their whispered, secretive incantations are oral texts meticulously memorized through years of training. In The Rulings of the Night, he shows how the shamans, during their dramatic night-long performances, create the worlds of words in which shamans exist.”

Mass, Leslie Noyes (Pakistan, 1962–64).

Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011019782

Publisher’s description: “In 1962, Leslie Noyes was one of the first to answer the call of President Kennedy. She found herself in a remote village in Pakistan, 21 years old, and fresh from college graduation, with the only directive to “find something to do” in a Muslim village with no other Peace Corps volunteers, no other Westerners, no program, and scarce resources. Coming face to face with her naiveté, youthful arrogance, and inexperience, she muddles her way through her first year of service, moves on to a larger city with other volunteers, then returns home to pursue a career as an educator. Forty-seven years later, she returns to Pakistan—a much-changed woman to a much-changed country. She intersperses the current-day tale with the journal entries from 1962, thereby providing a colorful and poignant comparison between a country in its infancy and a country in transition, and the woman of 21 with the woman of 68.”

McCann, David R., ed. (South Korea, 1966–68).

Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/99053800

Publisher’s description: “Preeminent scholar and translator David R. McCann presents an anthology of his own translations of works ranging across the major genres and authors of Korean writing—stories, legends, poems, historical vignettes, and other works—and a set of critical essays on major themes. A brief history of traditional Korean literature orients the reader to the historical context of the writings, thus bringing into focus this rich literary tradition. The anthology of translations begins with the Samguk sagi, or History of the Three Kingdoms, written in 1145, and ends with “The Story of Master Hô,” written in the late 1700s. Three exploratory essays of particular subtlety and lucidity raise interpretive and comparative issues that provide a creative, sophisticated framework for approaching the selections.”

McCauley, William (Sierra Leone, 1985–87).

The Turning Over. Sag Harbor, New York: Permanent Press, 1998. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/97030147

Publisher’s description: “The experiences of an American aid worker in Africa. He hates the rampant corruption, but likes the plentiful sex and drugs. Sent on a fishing project into the interior of Sierra Leone, he runs into armed rebels and nearly dies.”

McQuillan, Karin (Senegal, 1971).

Deadly Safari. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/89024102

Publisher’s description: “It’s open season on rich Americans. Leading the pack are two wealthy businessmen…with an aging wife apiece…. Two of them will soon be dead. Faced with this unnatural attrition, Jazz Jasper admits that her first run as an independent safari guide may also be her last. But every animal—even a desperate two-legged one—leaves a trail, and Jazz, hardly certain whether she is hunter or game, sets about trapping a remorseless human predator.”

Elephant’s Graveyard. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/92054391

Publisher’s description: “McQuillan’s Kenya is Isak Dinesen’s, seventy years later, a paradise lost but still breathtaking and rich in wildlife, with the potent magic to restore the spirits of Americans and Europeans in search of new beginnings. Recovering from a bad marriage and a worse divorce, American expatriate Jazz Jasper happily ekes out a living running safari tours and working for animal rights. When the lifeless body of wealthy American Ammet Laird, head of the Save the Elephants foundation, is found beside a watering hole, Emmet’s grieving lover, Mikki, presses her friend Jazz to investigate. But as Jazz stalks her game high in the forested hills and through the streets of Nairobi, she becomes certain that the murderer she seeks is someone she knows well….”

Meijer, Darcy Munson, ed. (Gabon, 1982–84).

Adventures in Gabon: Peace Corps Stories from the African Rainforest. 1st Peace Corps Writers ed. Oakland, California: Peace Corps Writers, 2011. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011935224

Goodreads.com review by Lawrence: “If you served in Gabon as a Peace Corps volunteer, this will be like a yearbook and a reunion all in one. It is a book of anecdotes by more than thirty writers who served between 1962 and 2005. This is the only Peace Corps book I have ever read that included accounts from years covering the entire Peace Corps experience in one nation (the Gabon program closed in 2005). Unlike most Peace Corps anthologies, this one includes contributions by volunteers who served after 1980. Equally unusual, the name of Shriver is never mentioned and Kennedy is mentioned only once. Divided into seven sections (Joining the Peace Corps, Not in Ohio Anymore, Health and Safety, Impressive People, Magic and Belief, Lessons in Culture and Fiction), the book notes each author’s name, dates of service and job. However, the anecdotes are actually answers to questions posed over the years by the editor of a quarterly newsletter called The Gabon Letter. Since they are answers to questions (What was the dumbest thing you did? What language mistakes did you make? Were you ever sick? etc.), they are generally very short and often filled with Peace Corps jargon (PCV, COS, TEFL, PCVL, CIRMF, STDs).”

Meisler, Stanley (staff/Washington, 1964–67).

When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2010033723

Publisher’s description: “Not an institutional history, When the World Calls is the first complete and balanced look at the Peace Corps’s first fifty years. Revelatory and candid, Stanley Meisler’s engaging narrative exposes Washington infighting, presidential influence, and the Volunteers’ unique struggles abroad. Meisler deftly unpacks the complicated history with sharp analysis and memorable anecdotes, taking readers on a global trek starting with the historic first contingent of Volunteers to Ghana on August 30, 1961. The Peace Corps has served as an American emblem for world peace and friendship, yet few realize that it has sometimes tilted its agenda to meet the demands of the White House. Tracing its history through the past nine presidential administrations, Meisler discloses, for instance, how Lyndon Johnson became furious when Volunteers opposed his invasion of the Dominican Republic; he reveals how Richard Nixon literally tried to destroy the Peace Corps, and how Ronald Reagan endeavored to make it an instrument of foreign policy in Central America. But somehow the ethos of the Peace Corps endured, largely due to the perseverance of the 200,000 Volunteers themselves, whose shared commitment to effect positive global change has been a constant in one of our most complex-and valued-institutions.”

Meijer, Darcy Munson, ed. (Gabon, 1982–84).

Adventures in Gabon: Peace Corps Stories from the African Rainforest. 1st Peace Corps Writers ed. Oakland, California: Peace Corps Writers, 2011. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011935224

Merullo, Roland (Micronesia, 1979–80).

Fidel’s Last Days: A Novel. 1st ed. New York: Shaye Areheart Books, 2008. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2008021278

Publisher’s description: “Roland Merullo has consistently wowed critics with his brilliant storytelling and his refusal to be pigeonholed, hopscotching from the coming-of-age tale (In Revere, in Those Days) to the novel-as-fable (Golfing with God) to the road trip genre (Breakfast with Buddha). Now Merullo delivers a dazzling and finely nuanced political thriller about a clandestine plot to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.”

Messinger, Delfi (Zaire, 1984–87).

Grains of Golden Sand: Adventures in War-Torn Africa. Honolulu, Hawaii: The Fine Print Press, 2007. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2006923404

Subject: The book appears to be based on the author’s Peace Corps experience in Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the city of Kinshasa. A main topic appears to be the Bonobo, once known as the pygmy chimpanzee.

Meyer, Michael (China, 1995–97).

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. New York: Walker & Co., 2008. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2008015546

Publisher’s description: “A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan. Meyer examines how the bonds that hold the neighborhood together are being torn by forced evictions as century-old houses and ways of life are increasingly destroyed to make way for shopping malls, the capital’s first Wal-Mart, high-rise buildings, and widened streets for cars replacing bicycles.”

Miles, William F. S. (Niger, 1977–79).

Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/93031669

Publisher’s description: “How have different forms of colonialism shaped societies and their politics? What can borderland communities teach us about nation building and group identity? William F. S. Miles focuses on the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa, whose land is still split by an arbitrary boundary established by Great Britain and France at the turn of the century. In 1983, Miles returned as a Fulbright scholar to the region where he had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1970s. Already fluent in the Hausa language, he established residence in carefully selected twin villages on either side of the border separating the Republic of Niger from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Over the next year, and then during subsequent visits, he traveled by horseback between the two places, conducting surveys, collecting oral testimony, and living the ethnographic life. Miles argues that the colonial imprint of the British and the French can still be discerned more than a generation after the conferring of formal independence on Nigeria and Niger.”

Miller, Christopher L. (Zaire [present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo], 1975–77).

Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/85001157

Publisher’s description: “Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have…imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it ‘Africa.’ There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Celine to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller’s wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of ‘Africanist’ discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world.”—James Olney, Louisiana State University

The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham: Duke University Press 2008. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2007033635

Publisher’s description: “The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.”

Mills, Nick B. (Colombia, 1965–66).

The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan. New York: John Wiley, 2007. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2007026599

Publisher’s description: “The untold story of Hamid Karzai’s dramatic rise to the presidency of Afghanistan and the problems he and his country face. In 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president in Afghanistan’s first-ever democratic election. Today, criticized for indecisiveness and targeted for assassination by extremists, President Karzai struggles to build on the country’s modest post-Taliban achievements before civil unrest undermines his government. Now, author Nick Mills draws on months of candid personal interviews with the charismatic Afghan president to offer a revealing portrait of the figure known to millions by his familiar uniform of karakul cap and long green chappan. Timely and compelling, Karzai tells the fascinating story of a unique leader with a keen intellect, a natural gift for storytelling, and a presidency in peril.”

Monninger, Joseph (Upper Volta [present-day Burkina Faso], 1975–77).

The Viper Tree. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/90010182

Publisher’s description: “Nothing in Monninger’s previous work…prepares one for this extraordinary novel, an intriguing psychological puzzle that explores the nature of belief in religion and in superstitious magic as well as the thin line between the two. AWOL Nazi soldier Fredereich Loebus flees Europe, unwittingly ending up in West Africa, where he is captured and treated viciously by a primitive tribe. Escaping into the desert, he is saved from death by a mission of French nuns…. Under threat of prison by the French authorities, Loebus escapes again, hiding in the bush, where he becomes “purely African,” acquiring a reputation as a healer with miraculous powers. Years later, Loebus, now known as Father Faujas, has become a nyanga, or witch man, with the ability to inflict deadly curses; even after his death, his reputation lives on in a macabre fashion. Monninger renders a stunning picture of West Africa, describing the terrain, the weather, and the customs and rituals of native tribes in a measured prose that also chillingly sets off the brutal events of the narrative.”

Morton, Fred (Nigeria, 1964–65)), Jeff Ramsey, and Part Themba Mgadia.

Historical Dictionary of Botswana. Historical Dictionaries of Africa; no. 44. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2007052314

Publisher’s description: “This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Botswana, through its chronology, introductory essay, appendixes, map, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important people, places, events, as well as institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects, provides an important reference on this African country.”

Morrow, Baker H. (Somalia, 1968–69).

Horses Like the Wind and Other Stories of Africa. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2001002646

Publisher’s description: “Set in Somalia just after its independence in the 1960s, Horses Like the Wind and Other Stories of Africa is a collection of nine short storied that paint a portrait of the many different lives that intertwine along the Horn of Africa. A ruthless horse dealer comes up against the best tracker in the Somali army; transplanted Italian farmers look to a future of stark disintegration as they struggle to hold on to their lands and their families; gutsy American women attempt to establish lives of their own in the remote East African desert; and a beggar and an idealist meet in a chance encounter on the steps of a Mogadishu bank, with mind-numbing consequences.”

Morrow, Baker H., translator. Álvar Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The South American Expeditions, 1540–1545. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011018934

Publisher’s description: “First published in 1555, Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of his South American expeditions is a detailed account of his five years as governor of Spain’s province of the Río de la Plata in South America. Cabeza de Vaca was already a celebrated explorer by the time he went to La Plata, known for his great trek across North America in the 1520s and 1530s and for the Relación he wrote about that journey. His tales of his river and forest explorations in South America show that he had lost none of his early curiosity and drive. He was the great secular champion of the native peoples of the New World and the only Spaniard to explore the coasts and interiors of two continents. This book is one of the great first-person accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. Morrow’s new translation makes Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures available to a wide English-speaking audience for the first time.”

Morrow, Baker H. A Tropical Place Like That: Stories of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2006021743

Publisher’s description: “Poignant, humorous, and probing by turns, and set in the legendary Tarascan country of Michoacan in the 1960s, these eleven tales of Mexican villagers and wandering young Americans bring into sharp focus a rural Latin American world that has all but vanished with the enormous changes of the last few decades. In “A Cathedral Half in Gray,” the ghost of a church and its new residents create an eerie home that never should have been. Millers and goblins follow the spectral white tracks of a burro train into a remote river valley in “The Red Kite.” A humble tire repairman and his wife want children too much, with disastrous consequences, in “The Flat.” The bloody Mexican Revolution casts its long shadow over a New Mexican grandmother and her doting granddaughter in the delightfully named “Dancing Is to Walking as Singing Is to Talking.”

Mueller, Marnie (Ecuador, 1963–65).

Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rain Forest. Willimantic, Connecticut: Curbstone Press, 1994. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/94002426

Awards: American Book Award, 1994; RPCV Writers & Readers’ Maria Thomas Fiction Award, 1995

Publisher’s description: “For her honeymoon, a former Peace Corps volunteer takes her husband to Ecuador to revisit old haunts. They get caught up in the violent politics of the rainforest where a multinational company is exterminating Indian tribes.”

Müller, Karin (Philippines, 1987–89).

Along the Inca Road: A Woman’s Journey into an Ancient Empire. Washington, DC: Adventure Press: National Geographic Society, 2000. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/2001274256

Publisher’s description: “In this vivid, freewheeling expedition, Karin Müller travels the ancient route to explore its dramatic history and discover new adventures along its length and breadth…. As she spins the wool of her stories into a modern tapestry of faces and memories, Muller intertwines a chronicle of the ancient Inca from their race’s mythical birth on an island in lofty Lake Titicaca to their sudden plunge from the height of imperial power at the hands of a ragtag band of Spanish soldiers of fortune. We learn how they lived, worshipped, and warred, and why such a magnificent culture proved so vulnerable to invaders.”

Hitchhiking Vietnam: A Woman’s Solo Journey in an Elusive Land. 1st ed. Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Globe Pequit Press, 1998. Library of Congress Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/97047233

Publisher’s description: “The author, an American woman, tells the story of her seven-month adventure hitchhiking through Vietnam in search of villages and people untouched by the encroaching commercialism of the Western world.”