The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 53 Department Foreign Service in 1955. Prior to his retirement in 1987, Mr. Stearns served as U.S. ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire (1976-1979) and Greece (1981-1985). Other overseas postings included Turkey, Zaire, the United Kingdom and Laos. In addition to numerous articles on U.S. foreign policy, Ambassador Stearns published two books under the aegis of the Council on Foreign Relations and Princeton University: Entangled Allies: U.S. Policy toward Greece, Turkey and Cyprus (1992) and Talking to Strangers: Improving American Diplomacy at Home and Abroad (1999). He died in 2016. Blown by the Wind Francesca Moran, AuthorHouse, 2019, $40.95/paperback, e-book available, 314 pages. Blown by The Wind would be fasci- nating even if it weren’t a true story, tracing the histories and eventual intersection of two families over four centuries: one of Irish and English descent, the other of Vietnamese, Chinese and French heritage. The memoir is Francesca Moran’s captivating account of meeting, falling in love with and marrying her husband, David, who entered the State Department Foreign Service in 1969. Assigned to Vietnam as part of the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support pacification program, he met Nhung (as she was known then) while in language training before going to CORDS. The first of three sections describes Nhung’s childhood and family in Vietnam, her journey to the United States, meeting Dave, and their long-distance engagement while he served in Vietnam and she remained in Washington, D.C. Throughout the book, Francesca quotes love letters from David, many of which describe his activities in Vietnam. That is followed by a travelogue recounting their various postings. The final section is heartbreaking: Francesca’s account of David’s slow descent into vascular dementia from 2013 until his death in December 2017. Referring to David in June 2016, one sentence leaps off the page and hits the reader in the gut: “Nothing hurts more than losing your loved one when the person is still alive.” Francesca Moran was born in Saigon in 1943. While attending The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1969, she met and eventually married David Moran, an FSO, and traveled with him all over the world until his retirement. Crickets Stephanie Garza, Do a Uye, 2021, $9.99/paperback, e-book available, 113 pages. It is relatively rare for someone in the Foreign Service to publish a memoir barely a decade into their career. And it is even more uncommon for an FS specialist to do so. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Stephanie Garza’s Crickets is her unflinching candor about her lifelong struggle to overcome the fears and self-doubts her abusive mother and dysfunctional family saddled her with. (The title refers to the silence she keeps encountering whenever she reaches out to loved ones and peers for support and affirmation.) Raised in Munster, Indiana, Garza earned a degree in human resources management from Purdue University. Her quest to join the Foreign Service began in 2002, when she took the Foreign Service generalist exam several times without success, before switching gears and applying to be a human resources officer. She successfully completed the specialist application process in 2010, but achieving her dream continues to bring new challenges, personally and professionally. Stephanie Garza has been a State Department human resources officer since 2010, serving in Venezuela, Pakistan, Russia and Mexico. She is now posted in Haiti. To accompany this book, Garza developed an app, also called Crickets, to support teens and young adults as they navigate life’s challenges.