The Foreign Service Journal, November 2009

N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35 and economic attaché in Tripoli from 2004 to 2006, the first to be stationed there since 1980. He has also served in the United Arab Emirates. During the 2008 presi- dential race, Chorin was a member of the Obama cam- paign’s Middle East Policy Group. Far Is the Moon of My Home Betsy Barnes, iUniverse, 2009, $26.95, paperback, 506 pages. Ted Hlavacek escaped to the United States with his mother and two brothers when he was 6 years old, just before the Nazi invasion. Though he was raised as a Catho- lic, his grandmother was Jewish, so no one in the family was safe. Now, in 1975, a recently married U.S. Foreign Serv- ice doctor and jazz pianist, Ted is spending the Christ- mas holiday with his family in Boston when he receives some alarming news from a cousin who lives in commu- nist Czechoslovakia. Their grandmother’s death from a supposed heart attack in Prague may not have been what it seemed, and there is also speculation about the cir- cumstances surrounding his father’s suicide years ago. Pushed by his wife Mona to find out the truth of his family’s WorldWar II struggles, Ted accepts a temporary assignment that takes him to U.S. embassies throughout Eastern Europe. What follows is an adventure that moves fromwonder and excitement to terror as the cou- ple is brought face to face with the dark secrets of a most painful period in Czechosovakia’s past. Betsey Barnes and her FSO husband, Harry, served in Bombay, Prague, Oberammergau, Katmandu, Buch- arest, Moscow, NewDelhi and Santiago. Her first novel, Unforgiving Heights , was published by Penguin Books in 2003. She and her husband live in Vermont. Escapement Jay Lake, Tor, 2008, $25.95, hardcover, 368 pages. Escapement — Jay Lake’s sec- ond offering of steampunk, the term for science fiction set in the Victorian era — crosses the genres of alternative history, science fic- Continued on page 41