The Foreign Service Journal, November 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2015 55 (where, by most accounts, she performed impressively). She was confirmed as ambassador to Brazil in 1959 despite strong oppo- sition from the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but resigned the position just four days later. She died in 1987 after a long, colorful life. Sylvia Jukes Morris is also the author of Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Claire Booth Luce (the first volume of this biography) and Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. Before the First Shots Are Fired: How America Can Win or Lose Off the Battlefield Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, St. Martin’s Press, 2014, $27/hardcover; $16.99/ paperback; $9.99/Kindle; $29.95/audiobook, 256 pages. Drawing on his vast experience, from com- bat in Vietnam to peacekeeping in Somalia, bureaucratic warfare in Washington, D.C., and negotiations with former rebels in the Philippines, retired four-star General Anthony Zinni argues that we have a lot of work to do to make the process of going to war—and keeping the peace—more successful. In this book, he critically examines the relationship between the executive branch and the military; the failures of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the challenges of working with the United Nations, coalition forces and NATO; the role of special forces and drone warfare; and the difficult choices that need to be made to create tomorrow’s military. Refreshingly, Zinni calls for the State Department, USAID and other foreign affairs agencies to be better funded, staffed and structured to be on par with their uniformed colleagues. Anthony C. Zinni retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2000 as commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, after a distinguished nearly 40-year military career. He is the co-author, with Tom Clancy, of Battle Ready (2004) and has written several books with writer Tony Koltz on foreign policy, including The Battle for Peace (2006) and Leading the Charge (2009). with now-18-year-old Larry. Vivid daydreams help him escape painful realities, but they become real when he meets an older, married woman, and his troubles vanish—until the crash. Duke Ryan served in the Foreign Service with USIA from 1961 to 1986. He is the author of The Vision of Anglo-America: The US-UK Alliance and the Emerging Cold War, 1943-1946 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies, and Diplomats (Oxford, 1998). He has written other shorter historical works, as well as commentaries for NPR. Little Aunt Crane Geling Yan, translated from Chinese by Esther Tyldesley, Random House U.K. (Harvill Secker), 2015, $14.99/paperback; $9.49/Kindle, 496 pages. Starting at the end of World War II, this new novel by acclaimed Chinese writer Geling Yan spans several tumultuous decades of Mao Tse Tung’s rule. With the collapse of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the elders of the Japa- nese settler village of Sakito decide to preserve their honor by killing all the villagers in an act of mass suicide. Only 16-year- old Tatsuru escapes. Fleeing, she falls into the hands of human traffickers and is sold to a wealthy Chinese family to be the clandestine second wife of the only son and the secret bearer of his children. Against all odds, she forms a friendship with the first wife in this story about love, bravery and how humanity endures in the most unlikely of circumstances. Geling Yan, the wife of retired FSO Lawrence A. Walker, is an award-winning Chinese novelist and screenwriter. Born in Shanghai in 1959, she served with the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, starting as a dancer in an enter- tainment troupe at age 12. Yan published her first novel in 1985. She did much of the research for Little Aunt Crane in Japan while she and her husband were assigned to the American Institute in Taiwan in Taipei. A previous novel, The Flowers of War (2012), has been adapted for film by the Chinese director Zhang Yimou and stars Christian Bale. Continued from page 49