30 NOVEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL He retired from his job as a management inspector for the O ce of the Inspector General in 2017 but continues to work part-time as a receptionist at the State Department. e couple lives in Wheaton, Maryland. Marielo: A Foreign Service Life in Diary and Letters M. Wesley “Wes” Shoemaker, Dorrance Publishing Co., 2023, $62.00/paperback, e-book available, 912 pages. Former Foreign Service O cer Wesley “Wes” Shoemaker was married to fellow FSO Mary Shoemaker for 51 years. After Mary’s death in 2013, Wes began the process of turning her personal writings into Marielo: A Foreign Service Life in Diary and Letters. Containing a total of 191 letters—116 of which were written to Wes—Marielo chronicles Mary’s life as a Foreign Service o cer who was forced to resign her position when she married a fellow FSO in 1962 because of a department policy that female FSOs who were married would not be paneled overseas. She rejoined the Service in 1974, when the State Department revised its policy on married women as Foreign Service o cers. Mary and Wes communicated through the slowly dying medium of letter writing, which provided a lifeline that held their marriage together through the months and years when they were separated by their work. M. Wesley Shoemaker is a former Foreign Service o cer. He resigned to enter a doctoral program in Russian history at Syracuse University and went on to teach at Lynchburg College. Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict Charles Trueheart, University of Virginia Press, 2024, $34.95/ hardcover, e-book available, 368 pages. Journalist Charles Trueheart was born into a Foreign Service family: His dad, William Trueheart, was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Saigon from 1961 to 1963, as the con ict in Vietnam was heating up. A close family friend, the author’s godfather, Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, served as the ambassador then. Diplomats at War is the young Trueheart’s account of how the con ict in Vietnam destroyed the close relationship between his dad and the ambassador, who never spoke again after a fallout over policy turned personal. e book is also fascinating for its portrayal of life as an FS kid in prewar Saigon. “ e author paints a fascinating portrait of the interagency process,” says Ambassador Laura Kennedy in a forthcoming FSJ review of the book. “He describes the diplomatic dilemmas that we continue to grapple with today: the diplomatic establishment seeking to assert its authority over an increasingly dominant military, the relationship of State and the CIA, journalists who not only report but shape political and popular attitudes, the embrace of ‘strong men’ whose proclivities can end up undercutting the policies we pursue.” Charles Trueheart is a former reporter and Paris bureau chief for e Washington Post, and he knows how to tell a story. He is also a past director of the American Library in Paris. Trueheart grew up in Paris, Ankara, London, and Saigon. Diplomats at War is the winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy’s 2024 Dillon Book Award for a Book of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy. A Jew in Gaza: Humanitarian Heartbreak, Hubris and Horrors Allan J. “Alonzo” Wind, Enable & Ennoble, 2024, $19.99/paperback, e-book available, 242 pages. is is the story of how A.J. “Alonzo” Wind, a retired Foreign Service o - cer and international development executive, became mission director for International Medical Corps in the occupied Palestinian territories and lived in Gaza and East Jerusalem from 2022 to 2023. It o ers a view into Gaza few have had. As an American Jew, a Baha’i, and a humanitarian, Wind lived through interminable con icts between Israel and Gaza. He writes of the two years he spent in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories, including and beyond the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the current war between Israel and Hamas. Wind explains how his organization struggled to provide humanitarian assistance in the face of con ict and danger to innocent civilians. Alonzo Wind is a retired USAID Senior Foreign Service o cer. From 1999 to 2019, he served in Managua, Luanda, Abuja, Baghdad (twice), Kandahar, Pretoria, and Washington, D.C.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=