The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 49 Ted Osius, a Foreign Service officer for 30 years, served from 2014 to 2017 as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, among many other assignments. Only the second openly gay career diplomat in U.S. history to achieve the rank of ambassador, Osius is a founding member of glifaa and went to Vietnamwith his husband (former FSO Clayton Bond) and children. Currently, he is the vice president of Fulbright University Vietnam. When Echoes Speak: A Memoir Dag Scheer, Tipaza, 2021, $16/paperback, e-book available, 386 pages. Growing up in an immigrant family that had found its way from Europe to Cleveland, Ohio, Dag Scheer was caught in a painful tug of war between her Latvian roots and her new life in Amer- ica. Determined to find her own path, she left home to teach, first in England, then in Libya. There, she met a young, charismatic doctor. After they married, her husband’s work as a Foreign Service medical officer led the couple to live in eight different countries between 1967 and 1995: Brazil, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Thailand, Germany, Austria, Kenya and Barbados. Paradoxically, the experience of being perpetually out of place all over the world helped Dag Scheer finally find a sense of self. When Echoes Speak not only offers tantalizing glimpses into exotic worlds, but shares insights she gained, as a doctor’s wife, into the health problems Americans face in their Foreign Service assignments overseas. But this memoir has an even larger purpose: to use her family’s eventful history to examine the way lives are shaped by memory and collective history, and the challenges of adapting to diverse cultures. In looking back, Scheer discovers intricate and rich patterns in her life, and weaves together the connecting threads. An educator and writer, Dag Scheer was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1939. Five years later, her family fled Latvia to escape Soviet occupation, and eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio.