The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2018 37 Thompson document his life as an accomplished career diplo- mat. They describe howThompson joined the Foreign Service both to feed his desire for adventure and from a deep sense of duty. They also detail the crucial role he played as a negotiator unafraid of compromise. Known in the State Department as “Mr. Tightlips,” Thompson was the epitome of discretion. People from completely opposite ends of the political spectrum lauded his approach to diplomacy and claimed him as their own. Reviewing the book in the March Journal , retired Senior FSO Jonathan B. Rickert declares that “Ambassador Thompson would have been proud of the skill, thoroughness and even- handedness with which his daughters compiled this biography.” Jenny Thompson runs an English-language school in Estepona, Spain. Before she retired, Sherry Thompson was the director of a nonprofit foundation. The authors spent eight years of their childhood in Moscow. Across the Brooklyn Bridge John Eric Lundin, CreateSpace, 2017, $25/paperback, 445 pages. When retired FSO John E. Lundin discovered his late father’s detailed diaries, begun in 1941 at age 19 and continuing through service in World War II and beyond, Lundin’s fascina- tion with his family’s history was stoked and the idea for this book was born. The story of a family across three generations and three continents and cultures, Across the Brooklyn Bridge is a uniquely American chronicle. The author’s grandfather, William, became a seaman in 1898 at the age of 15, and left his native Sweden just five years later as a crew member on the steamship Rhynland, which was sailing out of Liverpool to Philadelphia. After several years and dozens of trans-Atlantic crossings, William settled in the United States, in Brooklyn, to raise a family. The author’s father, John A. Lundin, who grew up in Brook- lyn in the 1920s and died in 2005, anchors the story. His diaries offer a window into the life of a young engineering student in wartime Brooklyn and New York City and a soldier in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in New Guinea and the Philippines. And they document the experience of an American soldier and his true love, a Filipina, overcoming the ocean dividing them and push- ing the boundaries of the socially acceptable in 1940s America to start their own family. The author’s exhaustive research to ensure historical accu- racy and the inclusion of many photos add to the depth of this multifaceted work. John E. Lundin served for 30 years with the U.S. Informa- tion Agency and the Department of State. His overseas postings included Taiwan, Denmark, China and Japan. Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad John Stewart, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, $39.95/ hardcover, $23.99/Kindle, 278 pages. In the early 1990s North America was the vibrant center of an increasingly democratic and revitalized Western Hemisphere. Washington and Ottawa were close allies, working together to implement a bilateral free trade agreement and build an integrated manufacturing and export economy. But by the late 2000s, the economic and dip- lomatic ties between the two countries were strained as policies stagnated or slipped backward, and passports were needed to cross the border for the first time in history. Relations have only deteriorated further under President Donald Trump’s adminis- tration. In Strangers with Memories , John Stewart combines an insider’s knowledge, a mole’s perspective and a historian’s consciousness to explain how two countries that spent the last century building a world order together drifted apart so quickly. He also details changes at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa and in its relationship with U.S. consulates in Canada and with the State Department’s Canada desk during those years. Explaining how Canada’s influence in the world depends on the United States and has radically diminished with the decline in diplomacy under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Stewart offers valuable advice on how Canada should handle its foreign policy in a much less stable world. John Stewart spent 20 years at U.S. Embassy Ottawa as a locally employed (then known as a Foreign Service national, or FSN) economist and manager. He is now director of policy and research at the Canadian Nuclear Association.