The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2018 43 Terrorism, Betrayal and Resilience: My Story of the 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombing Prudence Bushnell, University of Nebraska Press, 2018, $29.95/hardback, $28.95/Kindle, 288 pages. On Aug. 7, 1998, three years before President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al-Qaida bombed U.S. Embassy Nairobi and U.S. Embassy Dar es Salaam in a coordinated attack. At the time, Pru- dence Bushnell was the ambassador to Kenya. This book is her account of that fateful day’s events and their lasting impact. In a brutally honest take on our government’s failures and inadequacies, Bushnell points out that though the CIA, the NSA and the National Security Council had long been aware of bin Laden’s Nairobi cell, Congress and the American people were too busy following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Worse still, fol- lowing the attack there were no congressional hearings, and the required State Department Accountability Review Board occu- pied itself with minute security measures instead of addressing the mechanisms that had left the two embassies vulnerable. A retired Senior Foreign Service officer, Prudence Bushnell served as deputy assistant secretary of State for African affairs during the Rwanda genocide, as ambassador to Kenya and Guatemala, and as dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute. She is the founder of the Hamilton College Levitt Leadership Institute in New York City. Among numerous other awards, Government Executive named her one of the “20 All-Time Greatest Feds” in 2011. Veils in the Vanguard: Insights of an American Ambassador’s Wife in Kuwait Catherine Raia Silliman, CreateSpace, 2018, $9.99/ paperback, $5.99/Kindle, 218 pages. As soon as she arrived in Kuwait in 2014 as the wife of the U.S. ambas- sador, Catherine Raia Silliman began meeting women across the political spectrum. By the end of her two years there, she became convinced that Arab women will have a large say in how things turn out throughout the region—and it may not be what we in the West expect. Even though the author had been visiting Muslim countries for nearly 40 years, she was still shocked by Kuwait’s cultural restrictions. Women routinely worked, drove cars and voted, and about 70 percent of the students at Kuwait University were female. But they suffered from pervasive inequality, often institutionalized by law. Silliman’s memoir renders a sensitive portrayal of Kuwait’s complex, even contradictory, encounters with modernity. Catherine Raia Silliman’s fascination with the region began in 1976, when she traveled to Izmir, Turkey, as a high school exchange student. Three years later, during her junior year at Tufts University, she was studying in Cairo when radical stu- dents stormed the American embassy in Tehran. After graduat- ing and working as a reporter for a Saudi research company based in Washington, D.C., she earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in Middle Eastern studies. Silliman then worked in the State Department for nearly 15 years, where she met her husband, FSO Doug Silliman (currently the U.S. ambassador to Iraq). Kept: An American Househusband in India Gregory E. Buford, Moontower Press, 2018, $10.99/paperback, $7.99/ Kindle, 251 pages. This memoir is the hilarious, heart- warming tale of a company man who becomes a trailing spouse when his wife gets her dream job and drags him halfway around the world. Travelers and armchair tourists alike will marvel as Greg and Dana, a U.S. diplomat, dine with royalty, smash an immigrant smuggling ring, flee angry mobs, foil a terror- ist plot and survive a Russian rocket assault. When they adopt an Indian girl, Greg embarks on an altogether new career, and India becomes a part of their lives forever. Winner of the PNWA Zola Award for best memoir, Kept: An American Househusband in India will have you scouring the house for cobras and wondering if you’ve got what it takes to walk on fire. Gregory E. Buford has lived in the United States, the Domini- can Republic, Japan, India, France, Cambodia and Switzerland. He and his wife, Dana, a former FSO, currently live in Austin, Texas, with their children. His novel, Making Ghosts Dance (Moontower Press, 2017), was both a Montaigne Medal and Eric Hoffer Award finalist.