THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 45 The Nubian Queen Charles Ray, DS Productions, 2025, $0.99/e-book, digital only, 91 pages. After Octavian defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium and seized control of Egypt, he returned to Rome in triumph, made himself emperor, changed his name to Augustus, and set his sights on the gold-rich Nubian lands of the Upper Nile. But the people of Kush refused to surrender to Rome. Nubia, known as Ta-Seti to the Egyptians and Kush to those who lived there, was a kingdom of warriors. When its king was killed in an early battle with the Romans, his queen, a warrior who had lost an eye in the same battle, took the throne. Rome may have finally met its match. Charles Ray was an FSO from 1982 to 2012, with assignments in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. He was the first U.S. consul general in Ho Chi Minh City and was ambassador to Cambodia and Zimbabwe. Other books he has authored include Rusty Rhodes Bounty Hunter, Adventures of Marshal Boone Collins, and Caleb Johnson Mountain Man. Drinking from the Stream Richard Scott Sacks, Koehler Books, 2025, $20.95/paperback, e-book available, 326 pages. Drinking from the Stream is set in the early 1970s during the violent upheaval of the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The action in this coming-of-age tale leapfrogs from Louisiana to London, Paris, and East Africa. Jake Ries, a 22-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, becomes a fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal white supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life. Richard Scott Sacks was a State Department FSO from 1989 to 2014 with postings in Mexico City, Casablanca, Hanoi, Seoul,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=