The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2019 39 individual embracing Muslim and Christian identities, she searches for life’s meaning and purpose. Hala Buck grew up in Lebanon and earned a B.A. in art education from the American University of Beirut. She has trav- eled to 14 Arab countries and accompanied her Foreign Service officer husband, Steve, in seven. Her watercolors have been exhibited internationally, and she has worked as a State Depart- ment interior designer. Hala earned an M.A. and taught at Bowie State and George Washington University, and is a board-certified counselor and licensed clinical professional counselor. Her memoir is a volume in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. Wandering the World: Personal Recollections of a Life in Diplomacy Walter Cutler, 2017, independently published, $14.99/Kindle, 326 pages. In this engrossing memoir, career diplomat and former ambassador Walter Cutler takes readers into highly charged diplomatic scenes around the world. Among his many diplomatic endeavors, Cutler recalls working diligently on the Paris Peace Accords, studiously analyzing intelligence reports and propa- ganda coming out of Hanoi and working with senior leadership at State on crafting negotiation strategy—until he, and virtually everyone else at State, learned that the real negotiations were being carried out in secret between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. Cutler twice served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s, helping manage an often-difficult relationship amid intense regional conflict; as ambassador to Tunisia and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo); and as ambassador- designate to the Islamic Republic of Iran before diplomatic rela- tions were broken in 1980. He opened the first American post in Yaoundé, served as political officer in Algiers just after Algeria’s independence, and as political-military officer in Seoul at the time of North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo , among many other assignments. The episodes captured in this lively anecdotal history are at once enlightening, humorous and contemplative. Walter Cutler currently resides in Washington with his wife, Isabel, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the American Foreign Service Association. He served as president of Meridian Interna- tional Center from 1989 to 2006. FICTION AND POETRY Baobab Larry Hill, First Edition Design Publishing, 2019, $14.95/paperback, 326 pages. Larry Hill certainly captures the reader’s attention on the very first page of his second novel, Baobab : “Doctor Michael Eisenstat knew he’d have to fight falling asleep as the ambassador entered the room for his country teammeeting. He often dozed, as there was rarely anything of interest for him at these regular Tuesday morning confabs. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got 72 hours to leave the country,’ Holden Fairchild III, representative of the president of the United States of America to Zinani, declared unexpectedly. Eisenstat’s concern about nodding off vanished.” As we find out in flashbacks, the good doctor had only recently closed his thriving private practice in Beverly Hills and joined the Foreign Service in search of adventure. His first post- ing is Zinani, a landlocked West African nation controlled by a ruthless dictator—at least for the moment. Larry Hill, M.D., is a retired internist who spent 18 years in private practice in rural California and then joined the Foreign Service as a regional medical officer. He served in Mali, Bangla- desh, the Philippines, South Africa and China before retiring, and now teaches medical students at his alma mater, the Univer- sity of California at San Francisco. His previous novel, Philanthropist (2015), was a thriller about crime and aging.