The Foreign Service Journal, November 2004

Service in 2003, and settled in Williamsburg, Va. His pre- vious book, The Wines of Greece (1990), won awards from the Anglo Hellenic League and The Wine Guild of the U.K., and was a finalist for the James Beard Awards. Alias Pegge Parker Pegge (Parker) Hlavacek, iUniverse, Inc., 2003, $18.95, paperback, 219 pages. Pegge Parker’s life was full of ad- venture: fearless female reporter, mother of five, world traveler. A former vice consul in Lahore, she wrote — lucidly, captivatingly — through all the phases of her life, from the beginning of her journalism career as an advice columnist for teenagers, as a reporter for the Washington Times- Herald and then the Fairbanks (Alaska) News Miner , then on to China where she met and married CIA agent Douglas Mackiernan and gave birth to twins (MacKiernan was killed by Tibetan border guards when China fell to the communists), and to Pakistan, where she accepted a position at the embassy and met the man who would become her second husband — John Hlavacek, a foreign correspondent for UPI. This autobiography, containing many of her most interesting interviews with famous people, spans the years from 1941 to 1961. Like the earlier volume that concentrated on the family’s stay in India, Diapers on a Dateline (2003), this book is an act of love; put togeth- er by Pegge’s husband John Hlavacek from a manu- script he found in a box of yellowed newspaper clip- pings, photographs, letters and scrapbooks four decades after it had been written. Fleet Tug Sailor: A Memoir of World War II Allen C. Hansen, self-published, 2004, $14.95, paperback, 88 pages. This is a World War II memoir of three years with Continued on p. 48 F O C U S N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43