The Foreign Service Journal, October 2011

34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 book is to share some of the stories of our ancestors’ memories.” A retired Foreign Service officer, Anne Terio was born in Lafayette, Ga., and grew up in Burlington, N.C. She is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolu- tion and the Colonial Dames XVII Century. She has a passion for history and writing, and has published several books. She resides in Alexandria, Va. The Sullivan Saga: Memories of an Overseas Childhood M.H. Sullivan, Romagnoli Publications, 2010, $14.99, paperback, 290 pages. This is a lively and insightful story of the exotic, funny and some- times bittersweet overseas child- hood of an FS daughter and her six brothers. It begins in 1957, when author Maureen Sulli- van is 6 years old and, with her mother and four brothers, sets out to join her father, Eugene F. Sullivan, an FSOwith USAID, in Korea. The family was among the first Amer- ican dependents allowed to live in the country after the Korean War. After more than five years in Seoul, they move on to Taiwan, and then on to postings in the Philippines and Thailand. The saga ends in Ethiopia, where, in 1972, Mr. Sullivan died an untimely death of Blackwater fever, a virulent form of malaria. (In May Eugene Sullivan’s name was added to the AFSA Memorial Plaques, which honor FS members who have lost their lives in the line of duty overseas.) Ms. Sullivan’s detailed memories are recorded thought- fully and with the benefit of hindsight, forming a kind of prism through which the reader comes to reflect on the process of growing up and appreciate the adaptability of children to cultures other than their own — as well as the fortitude and courage of diplomat parents trying to raise their children to be citizens of the world as well as good Americans. Maureen Sullivan lives with her husband in New Hampshire, where she is a technical writer for an interna- tional software company by day and a novelist by night. The Sullivan Saga is her second book. Her first, Trail Magic: Lost in Crawford Notch (Romagnoli Publications, 2009), a novel about a 14-year-old girl, was the 2010Mom’s Choice Award gold medal winner. My Daddy Fought the Cold War C. Robert Dickerman, Augusta Free Press, 2011, $15.95, paperback, 212 pages. In the spring of 1991, Bob Dickerman took his two young daughters to visit the Brandenburg Gate, for decades one of the few crossings of the BerlinWall that di- vided West Germany from the communist East. He had last seen theWall, newly built, in 1963, one year into a For- eign Service career that would span four decades. Stand- ing before it again, less than two years after its dramatic fall, there was much to reflect on in the stark contrast between the world in which he had moved and worked for 30 years and the one that his girls would grow up in. This lively, vaguely tongue-in-cheek memoir consists of episodic tales from Dickerman’s long career as a self- described “working-stiff diplomat” in Africa, Asia, Eu- rope and the Caribbean. Ranging from the harrowing (the death of locally engaged reporters in the course of service) to the hilarious (a marriage proposal via short- wave radio out of Mogadishu), the tales both inform and entertain with minute and deeply personal details that are often neglected in memoirs. Dickerman paints a compelling portrait of what it was really like to work on the diplomatic front lines of the Cold War. Bob Dickerman joined the United States Information Agency in 1962. He served in that capacity all over the world and, in addition, as deputy chief of mission in Trinidad & Tobago. He now lives near the George Wash- ington National Forest, west of Staunton, Va. Sad Specimens for Tea Jonathan Chase, ed., CreateSpace, 2011, $30.48, paperback, 636 pages. Sad Specimens for Tea is a col- lection of letters written by Caro- line “Nan” Chase, the wife of FSO Peter Chase, to her mother be- tween 1928 and 1969. It is the heartwarming and life-affirming story of one woman’s international journey from childhood up to her fiftieth year, organized and published posthu- mously by her son. The vibrant letters offer a firsthand ac- count of growing up in America between two world wars C OVER S TORY