The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

46 NOVEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the ethnic and religious minority that makes up the largest segment of the population in the province. By 2012, when Wecker did his second Afghanistan tour—this one at Camp Marmal in Balkh province—all PRTs had been shut down, and travel was greatly restricted. And by 2018, when he served there for the third time—at Bagram Air Base, as political adviser to the NATO Special Forces Combined Command– Afghanistan—Wecker was the only FSO in Afghanistan living outside the heavily fortified embassy compound in Kabul. He never left the base except by air. Most of the photos in this all-too-timely book are from Bamiyan, a reflection of Wecker’s ability to travel and take photos there wherever he wanted. He still considers Bamiyan the most wonderful place he has ever seen, for its people and landscape alike. He notes that Balkh province and Bagram were unique in their own ways, as well, but travel and photography there were much more severely restricted. John Wecker recently completed a 31-year Foreign Service career, which also included assignments to Kingston, Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Tokyo, Beirut and Washington, D.C. From Timbuktu to Duck and Cover: Improbable Tales from a Career in Foreign Service Lewis Lucke, Open Books, 2020, $19.95/paperback, e-book available, 191 pages. “It was never boring,” Lewis Lucke said of his 30-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Even by FS stan- dards, Lucke packed a remarkable number of adventures into his 1978- 2008 diplomatic career with the U.S. Agency for International Development. As he recounts in the pages of this fascinating memoir, Lucke’s work took him to Timbuktu (twice) and to the jungles of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca; he also witnessed the fall of communism in former Czechoslovakia, toured biblical sites in Jerusalem and interacted with several U.S. presidents. Lucke was in the Middle East in the scary run-up to the first Persian Gulf War. And he was deployed to the war zone of Iraq following the 2003 U.S. invasion as the first USAID Mission Director for Iraq, where he managed a $4 billion reconstruction program, the largest funded by the United States since the Marshall Plan. After Iraq, Lucke was named U.S. ambassador to the last absolute monarchy in Africa, Swaziland, from 2004 to 2006, when he retired for a second time. He was called back by USAID in 2008 to serve as acting mission director in Brazil, then as team lead of a joint State/ USAID study of economic governance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, finally, as U.S. government lead on the Haiti earthquake relief in 2010. Ambassador (ret.) Lewis Lucke received USAID’s two highest awards, the Administrator’s Distinguished Career Award in 2001 and the agency’s Award for Heroism in 2004. He is the author of Waiting for Rain: Life and Development in Mali, West Africa (1998). He now lives in Austin, Texas, where he runs an international consulting business. Shattered Chasm: The Lighter Side of Living in Liberia Michael W. Nicholson, independently published, 2021, $12.99/paperback, e-book available, 83 pages. At first blush, there is something incongruous about the title of this book. After all, chasms generally do not suggest associations that fit the category of “the lighter side.” For that matter, many readers— including some Foreign Service members—may be skeptical that there is anything humorous about a country as poor and strife-ridden as Liberia. Enter Michael Nicholson, a USAID Foreign Service officer, who plainly believes there is. To make his case, the author cites the professional and personal experiences he acquired during his two-year assignment to Monrovia, from 2012 to 2014. What his title refers to, he explains, is the concept of the “chasm” of culture, politics and history between citizens of Western countries and the poorest of the poor. The stories Nicholson has collected here truly capture the lifestyle of an expatriate aid worker, while raging against the culture of charity, steeped in pity, that often feeds the machine of development work that makes that lifestyle a cliché. Perhaps Nicholson’s most important point in this book is a deceptively simple one: Pity demoralizes and dehumanizes. Don’t pity other people, ever. Michael Nicholson joined the Foreign Service in 2010 as an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has served in Liberia, Pakistan, Kenya and is now serving in Ghana. Prior to joining the FS, he was a USAID contractor in Armenia and Egypt. Nicholson’s background is in academia,