The Foreign Service Journal, November 2010

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 Arabian Nights and Daze follows a U.S. Foreign Service couple as they renew an official presence in Yemen at a time when neither country was interested in having full diplomatic relations. Arriving in Sanaa three years after the closing of the U.S. embassy, they opened and managed the U.S. interests section within the Italian embassy. Author Susan Clough Wyatt’s husband, David William McKlintock, served as principal officer, and she was the mission’s secretary — at a time when FS wives were referred to as “dependents” and evaluated in their husband’s yearly personnel reports. Wyatt describes the challenges they faced with can- dor. She also recounts Yemen’s struggles to become a modern, viable state just eight years after the Republi- can Revolution had ousted a thousand-year-old dynasty of Shiite (Zaydi) Muslim imams. The portrait Wyatt paints of the Yemeni people as she knew them in the 1970s — proud, respectful, loyal, friendly, hospitable and inexperienced in Western ways — contrasts sharply with the terrorists described in the media after the USS Cole attack in 2000. The last two chapters compare Yemen then and now, identifying the major challenges the present govern- ment faces as it attempts to maintain stability in the face of a global terrorist threat that continues to penetrate its borders. Part of ADST’s Memoirs and Occasional Pa- pers Series, the book is richly illustrated. Susan Wyatt is a former FS spouse and career coun- selor. She and her present husband, Richard Williams, divide their time between Albuquerque, N.M., and Eu- gene, Ore. She is the author of Thirty Acres More or Less: Restoring a Farm in Virginia (Warm Snow Pub- lishers, 2003). Present at the Footnote: Personal Commentary on American Diplomacy Henry E. Mattox, ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series, Xlibris, 2010, $19.99, paperback, 204 pages. In 1996, a small group of retired FSOs in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina founded an Internet journal, American Diplomacy Do you have Earn reward points when using an SDFCU Credit or Debit Card*. Visit www.sdfcu.org/flexpoints to learn more. *Signature transactions only. Points?