The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

the journey to the Americas —Strickland would remain in Senegal for more than a quarter of a century. Stephen H. Grant’s interest in Strickland was sparked after purchasing an envelope on eBay that had been sent from Boston via Bordeaux to Strickland at Gorée Island in 1889. Strickland kept meticulously detailed diaries, which help to show how the duties of a 19th-century consular office differ from today’s. Instead of issuing visas and replacement passports, the main objective of Strickland and his contemporaries was to “monitor and facilitate American shipping abroad and … to look out for the welfare of American seamen.” Strickland sent 272 dispatches to the State Department in his 23 years as consul, trying to inform the U.S. diplomatic and commercial communities about the benefits of trade with Africa. Stephen H. Grant served for 25 years with USAID and was posted in the Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Indonesia, Egypt, West Africa and Guinea. He is also the author of three books that use old picture postcards to recount social history. He is currently a senior fellow at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. This book is part of the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Tales from the Embassy: The Extraordinary World of C. Van H. Engert Jane Morrison Engert, Eagle Editions, 2006, $31.50, paperback, 286 pages. This biography is not only a portrait of a larger-than-life American diplomat, the author’s grandfather, whose Foreign Service career spanned two World Wars — from 1912 to 1945. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into the evo- lution of the State Department and Foreign Service and major historical events. Cornelius Van Hemert Engert, who enjoyed creat- ing mystery as to his origins, began as a student inter- preter in Constantinople and retired as U.S. minister in Kabul. In his own words, his career “went from one calamity to another” — including stints in Constan- tinople during the Balkan Wars and World War I, in Peking during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and in Addis Ababa when Mussolini’s troops conquered Ethiopia. There, he, his wife and several aides took up arms and personally defended the unprotected American legation from rioting mobs. Engert’s service was eventful and his life was long. He socialized both with Cyrus Vance and Ed Muskie (Secretaries of State under Jimmy Carter) and with William Howard Taft’s Secretary of State, Philander C. Knox. He outlived all his Old World diplomatic colleagues, as his granddaughter writes in the book’s introduction, to become “an enchanting relic of a more courtly period in American diplomacy, and of a State Department still absorbed in the 19th century.” Jane Morrison Engert drew extensively from her grandfather’s papers housed and catalogued at Georgetown University. She supplemented this rich resource with research into historical and newspaper archives to document context and details in this absorb- ing story. Engert attended Wellesley and Yale, and lives and writes in Oregon. MEMOIRS & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Echoes of a Distant Clarion: Recollections of a Diplomat and Soldier John G. Kormann, New Academia/Vellum Books, 2007, $46.00/hardcover, $30.00/paperback, 500 pages. An exciting era in the 20th century comes alive in this autobiography of an adventur- ous diplomat, soldier and intelligence officer, the sev- enth title in ADST’s Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. Following combat in Europe in World War II, Special Agent Kormann goes behind enemy lines to apprehend Nazi war criminals and uncover a mass grave. As a U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps field office commander in Berlin from 1945 to 1947, he searches for Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, and the American traitor, “Axis Sally.” He rescues a German scientist from the Soviet secret police in a case that makes international headlines. In 1950, as a new Foreign Service officer, Kormann is placed in charge of three counties in Bavaria during the final days of the American occupation. Later he is involved in the abortive Hungarian Revolution, the U-2 spy plane affair and the U.S. response to erection of the Berlin Wall. As a political officer in Manila, he witness- es the onset of the Marcos regime; as officer-in-charge at Embassy Benghazi, he directs its defense against a mob that attacked and burned it during the 1967 Arab- 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7