Announcing My New Book And More! October, 2020

  Dear Friends and Colleagues from Around the World, This month’s Culture Watch will highlight books from the “counterculture” era to one from today’s “Black Lives Matter” movement. Two Special Projects will take center stage, starting with my search for a publisher for my second book and my latest article on a Maya activist in Guatemala whose unique experience will inform our documentary film. My new book will be about one of the great, but little-known, authors of the 20th century who wrote on the coast of Ecuador. Next, a quick update on the Rotary/Peace Corps partnership and the Calendar […]

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

  As part of my ongoing education on “Black Lives Matter,” revisiting the tenth-anniversary edition of this iconic best seller, which the Chronicle of Higher Education deemed “one of the most influential books of the past 20 years” seemed timely. I recently learned that Blacks comprise 47% of people in prison in Florida, and yet make up only 17% of the population, and also that Florida was one of four remaining states where felons are banned for life from voting. That changed when 65% of the population voted to restore ballot access to people with prior felony convictions, so what […]

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Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini

This seemed the perfect time to read a story that took place in the early 1970s, when Jay Parini arrived at the oldest university in Scotland in flight from his draft board in the U.S., which had designs on sending him to Vietnam. I had just published an article about my flight from my draft board that same period, “Crested Butte 1970: Reflections on a Town in Transition.”  My flight would be to Guatemala with the Peace Corps, but I also had ties to St. Andrews Scotland where Parini had escaped. My wife and I visited my mother’s cousin and […]

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