The Foreign Service Journal, November 2016

36 NOVEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL His position in public affairs gave hima unique perspective into the lives of citizens and the local politics in each country in which he lived, and he shares stories fromeach location. At times humorous and witty, at times tragic and serious, Grimland highlights specific aspects of each place in hopes of providing readers with a new perspective on cultural differences. He discusses the tragic events in Cyprus in 1974 when the ambas- sador was killed, but also offers droll accounts of his mishaps on foreign terrain. Always entertaining and thoughtful, this book is a virtual travel guide for readers. Dave Grimland retired from the Foreign Service in 1995 and lives in Columbus, Montana. He was featured in a 2007 Los Ange- les Times article about his efforts to counter negative images of the Muslimworld. A Year at the Edge of the Jungle: A Congo Memoir, 1963-1964 Frederic Hunter, Cune Press, 2015, $19.95/paperback, $9.95/Kindle, 247 pages. In the early 1960s, the U.S. government decides to establish an American Cul- tural Center in Coquilhatville—Coq for short, now known as Mbandaka—in the remotest province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But each officer assigned to staff the office refuses in turn to go, calling Coq a hellhole. Enter Fred Hunter, a young U.S. Information Agency officer who had just completed training in Belgium. Why not send him into “the heart of darkness,” a trusty typewriter his only friend? Quoting liberally from letters to his California family he wrote on that typewriter more than half a century ago, Hunter’s memoir recounts his adventures during that tumultuous year. Frederic Hunter served as a Foreign Service officer with the United States Information Service in Brussels and at all three posts in the Republic of the Congo: Bukavu, Coquilhatville and Léopoldville. He later became the Africa correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor , based in Nairobi. While a graduate student in African studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hunter wrote “The Hemingway Play.” Given a staged reading at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, it was presented at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center and produced by PBS. That led to opportunities to write screenplays for 20th Century Fox, ABC, CBS, PBS and others. A Year at the Edge of the Jungle is Hunter’s sixth book. He blogs at TravelsinAfrica.com. The Unquiet Daughter Danielle Flood, Piscataqua Press, 2016, $19.95/paperback, 375 pages. In the words of Michael Shelden, a Gra- hame Greene biographer and Indiana State University professor of literature, the author of this fascinating memoir “is the child of an affair so much like the one described in the love triangle of Greene’s novel [ The Quiet American ] that she is perfectly right to make her startling claim, ‘I am a sequel he never wrote.’” Danielle Flood recounts her search for her biological father after her stepfather, FSO Jim Flood, the only father she ever really knew, and her French-Vietnamese mother divorced in 1957 when she was 8. Living a privileged but isolated child- hood, she trails along across the United States and around the world behind her eccentric mother, who leaves her in burlesque house dressing rooms in the Midwest, in convent schools on Long Island and in Dublin, and with complete strangers in New York City. Flood chronicles her complicated relationship with her mother and reveals how she finally discovered the truth about her parents’ life in Saigon in the late 1940s and early 1950s, finally understanding a little more about who she truly is. A writer for the Associated Press in New York City and staff reporter for five regional papers, Danielle Flood has a gradu- ate degree from the Columbia Journalism School and lives in southern Maine with her husband, artist Jim Morin. Far Away Places Michael Hacker, Book Arts, 2016, hardcover, 742 pages. The inspiration for this memoir by retired USAID Senior Foreign Service Officer Michael Hacker began one morning when the diplomat-turned- history teacher was on his daily three- mile run and the thought occurred to him that he didn’t know how his late parents had met and didn’t know much about his family’s history. Hacker asked his siblings, and they didn’t know, either. Thus began a decade- long quest to uncover the story of his ancestors—the Hackers, Jones and Vanzandt families. His extensive research and travel in pursuit of the family narrative culminated in this weighty limited-edition volume. Complete with a center section of photographs and docu-