The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 51 So You Want to Be a Diplomat? George Lambrakis, Xlibris, 2019, $19.99/paperback, 354 pages. George Lambrakis distills his expe- rience of more than three decades in the U.S. Foreign Service and two decades teaching international rela- tions and diplomacy in this memoir, candidly sharing details about his career, assessments of the historic events in which he played a part and insights about the work of diplomacy. In lucid anecdotes, he takes readers through interactions with world leaders and common people in visits to Vietnam, Middle Eastern hot spots and nations afflicted by civil war, and shares his policy disagreements with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other higher-ups in the State Department. Lambrakis goes on to lead an office attempting to limit the political fallout of the U.S. military buildup in the Middle East that would contribute to Saddam Hussein’s decisive defeat in the Persian Gulf War, but also to the disastrous invasion of Iraq that followed and to Osama bin Laden’s growing resentment of the United States. A Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Information Agency and the State Department from 1954 to 1985, George Lambrakis served in Beirut, London and Tel Aviv, and on the State Department Israel desk during the 1967 Six-Day War. He was one of two American observers (with Ambassador Alfred “Roy” Atherton Jr.) at the Israel-Syria disengagement negotiations after the 1973 Arab-Israeli (or Yom Kippur) War, and he was deputy chief of mission and political counselor in Tehran during the Iranian revolution, among many other assignments during his long career. The Tin Can Crucible: A Firsthand Account of Modern-Day Sorcery Violence Christopher Davenport, Lume Books, 2020, $4.99/e-book, 227 pages. In 1994, Peace Corps volunteer Chris Davenport traveled to Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands to live among subsistence farmers. There, he settled into village life and learned the local language. Then one day the villagers kidnapped, tortured and killed a local woman who was accused of sorcery. Davenport is forced to reconcile this unspeakable act with a community he had come to love. Trying to comprehend what he had witnessed, he is left with one ques- tion: How can love survive the unthinkable? In this moving story, Davenport recounts a personally transformative experience. He surveys the integrity of his own well-meaning volunteer effort and asks challenging questions about the role of philanthropy at the intersection of cultures. It is a story about empathy, grief and the complexity of humanity. Christopher Davenport is a Foreign Service public diplomacy officer currently serving in Tbilisi. He previously served in Ho Chi Minh City and Guatemala City, as a watch officer in the Operations Center and as cultural affairs officer in Dushanbe. He and his wife have two daughters and an assortment of pets they have collected from around the world. FICTION The Angel’s Share: A Wine Country Mystery Ellen Crosby, Minotaur Books, 2019, $26.99/hardcover, e-book available, 368 pages. When Lucie Montgomery attends a Thanksgiving weekend party for friends and neighbors at Hawthorne Castle—owned by the Avery family, the last great newspaper dynasty in America—she doesn’t expect the fes- tive occasion to end in death. But soon after Prescott Avery, the 95-year-old family patriarch, tells Lucie he’ll pay any price for a cache of 200-year-old Madeira that her great-great-uncle, a Prohibition bootlegger, discovered hidden in the U.S. Capitol in the 1920s, she and her fiancé, winemaker Quinn Santori, discover Prescott’s body lying in his wine cellar. Lucie’s investigation uncovers tantalizing hints of a mysterious vault supposedly containing documents hidden by the Founding Fathers and a possible tie to William Shakespeare. If Lucie finds the long-lost documents, the explosive revelations could change history. But will she uncover a 300-year-old secret in time to avoid becoming the next victim? Ellen Crosby, the wife of FSO André de Nesnera of the Voice of America, began writing mysteries under her maiden name