The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

in 1962 on their Soviet tours. Tuch writes about his friendship with Georg Solti in the 1950s, his atten- dance at great music festivals in Salzburg, Florence and Bayreuth, and many operatic productions and concert performances. In the early 1960s, Hans Tuch served as an assis- tant to U.S. Information Agency Director Edward R. Murrow and, later, as deputy director of the Voice of America. In retirement, he has been an adjunct pro- fessor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. His book is part of the ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. Bushels and Bales: A Food Soldier in the Cold War Howard L. Steele, Vellum, 2008, $28.00, paperback, 416 pages. Take one Pennsylvania-born, university-trained development economist, mix with the people, problems and opportunities of 43 countries, stir in a variety of U.S. government programs, and you can learn a lot. Howard Steele certainly did, as he recounts in this lively memoir. Readers will accompany Steele as he survives gun- toting Bolivian revolutionaries, Viet Cong mortar and rifle fire, deadly anarchy in Sri Lanka, a shakedown by Tanzanian police, Taiwanese cockroaches the size of kittens and sheep’s-eye stew in Saudi Arabia. He tells it as it happened, with no partisan spin — just authentic, on-the-scene detail. Poverty and prosper- ity, fear and fun, mistakes, corruption, incompe- tence, language and cultural glitches and develop- ment successes — all are here. The author provides insight and perspective for students of international development, travel buffs, and those seeking a firsthand account of the joys and disappointments of a life overseas. Present and for- mer practitioners from USAID and the Department of Agriculture should also find this book of interest. Howard L. Steele served from 1971 to 1997 as a development economist with the Foreign Agricul- tural Service and its predecessor agencies for 34 years. He has written widely on economics, agricul- ture and biography, and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. This book is part of the ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers series. Dreams and Other True Tales Anna Maria Malkoç, Bookstand Publishing, 2008, $15.95, paperback, 192 pages. Following her retirement from the Foreign Service in 1990, Anna Maria Malkoç joined a group of volunteer English teachers from Baltimore on a visit to their sister city in southern China, Xiamen. The story of this “hot, humid, highly educational and truly fabulous” experience is recounted in this memoir, along with a variety of tales from the author’s past that focus on the mysterious and some- times strange coincidences, epiphanies, dreams and twists of fate that life offers. There are stories from the U.S., Turkey, Poland, Germany and Japan that took place from the 1870s to 2007. Many of these well-crafted stories are accompanied by commentaries that explain their context in the histo- ry of the author’s life and family. Most of the stories are personal observations, episodes and vignettes from her own travels, but some are from other family members and friends. Her effort to retrace her ancestors’ journey in “Dreams, Parts I-III,” is particularly interesting. Anna Maria Malkoç was an English teaching officer with USIA from 1975 to 1990, serving in Washington, D.C., Ankara and Warsaw. Following her retirement from the Foreign Service, she taught American studies in a Japanese women’s branch college in Spokane, Wash., wrote several English as a Second Language textbooks, and retired again in 2000. She is the author of A Bed of Roses: An American Woman’s Memoirs from Turkey (Bookstandpublishing, 2005). Her books can be ordered online at www.ebookstand.com/cate gory.php. Farewell, My Beijing: The Long Journey from China to Tucson Chi Newman, Wheatmark, 2008, $14.95, paperback, 160 pages. This unusual story, told with grace and candor, recounts Chi Newman’s odyssey from Beijing to Tucson. The privileged daughter of a cosmopolitan Chinese gov- ernment official in pre-revolutionary Beijing, at age 13 Chi and her twin sister were abruptly thrust out into the world on their own. To escape the communists, they were summarily dispatched to an aunt in 32 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 8