THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 35 transports readers to the front lines of a global upbringing, from navigating life in foreign capitals to the complex emotions of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. With humor, honesty, and keen insight, the author presents a unique perspective on history, home, and the human connections that shape us. Embassy Kid is a volume in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s Memoirs and Occasional Papers series. J.K. Amerson López, a writer and motivational speaker, is the eldest daughter of Foreign Service Officer Robert C. Amerson, who served with the U.S. Information Agency from 1955 to 1979, in Caracas, Milan, Bologna (SAIS), Rome, Bogotá, Washington, D.C., and Madrid, and as the Murrow Fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit Matthew Algeo, Island Press, 2025, $35.00/hardcover, e-book available, 288 pages. In the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to Harlem. Air pressure would shoot passengers up and down the island in clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against the operators of the horse-drawn streetcars and the politicians in their pay, including William M. Tweed, the notorious “Boss” of Tammany Hall. In New York’s Secret Subway, Matthew Algeo tells a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach against the oafish tyrant Tweed, the exemplar of corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history. Matthew Algeo is the spouse of Allyson Algeo, who recently retired after a 20-year Foreign Service career that took the couple to Bamako, Rome, Ulaanbaatar, Maputo, Sarajevo, and Gaborone. They now live in Lawrence, Kansas, where Algeo hosts NPR’s Morning Edition on Kansas Public Radio. Operation Làm Quen: Motorcycling Rural Vietnam, One Landing Zone at a Time Stephen F. Berlinguette, Royal King Dynasty Press, 2025, $14.99/paperback, e-book available, 340 pages. On a solo motorbike journey through Vietnam, Stephen Berlinguette seeks out the forgotten front lines of the Vietnam War—crumbling firebases, overgrown airstrips, and jungle-claimed bunkers—tracing what remains of America and Vietnam’s shared past. Along the way, he trades stories with local veterans, drinks roadside beer, and navigates the quiet hum of rural life. Both travelogue and historical investigation, Operation Làm Quen explores a Vietnam where memory clings to the soil and silence says more than monuments. With dry wit and clear-eyed reflection, the author confronts his own uneasy fascination with war ruins, the allure of dark tourism, and the distance between then and now. This story of rust, ghosts, and the road is a mustread for war history buffs, veterans, off-map travelers, and lovers of the long ride. Stephen Berlinguette was a USAID Foreign Service officer for 15 years, managing teams and economic growth programs in Rwanda, Liberia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Morocco until the agency’s dismantling in 2025. He also served with the Department of Commerce for more than three years. No Use of Force— The End of the Marxist Era in Mongolia: The Memoirs of Jambyn Batmönkh D. Tsedev, translator, Michael Allen Lake and Joseph E. Lake, editors, Mongolia Society, 2024, $50.00/ paperback, print only, 277 pages. In 1984, at the urging of members of the Soviet Politburo led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Jambyn Batmönkh replaced Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal as leader of the Mongolian People’s Republic, the world’s second-oldest Marxist country. Over the next six years, Mongolia attempted to maintain its socialist identity as Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and the unraveling of the Soviet Union were taking place next door.
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