Judy Heimann entered the diplomatic life in 1958 to join her husband, John, in Jakarta at his American Embassy post, setting her on a path across the continents as she mastered the fine points of diplomatic culture. Drawn from memories of fifty years of life in the U.S. Foreign Service...
During a 37-year Foreign Service career, Terry McNamara had three postings in Vietnam—as provincial adviser with the CORDS program, first principal officer in Danang, and consul general in Can Tho. Escape with Honor tells the true story of then–Consul General McNamara’s harrowing evacuation from Can Tho down the Mekong River by boat,...
Deane Hinton’s memoir presents a reliable firsthand account of the development of U.S. strategic economic policy and the new institutions that became the framework for trade, aid, economic growth, and monetary policy. Hinton was one of a handful of experts on these issues to serve in high policy positions throughout...
Former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific John H. Holdridge was intimately involved in the historic events surrounding the establishment of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. With responsibility for East Asia on the National Security Council staff in 1969–73, he...
This history, twenty years in the research and writing, relates the story of Americans living in Kuwait, beginning with the establishment of the American Mission Hospital in 1911. It covers the first century of community experience ending in 2011, which is also the fiftieth anniversary of Kuwait's emergence as an...
As one of those taken hostage by Congolese rebels at the U.S. Consulate he headed in Stanleyville (now Kisangani), Michael Hoyt provides the first inside account of the 1964 seizure of the American consulate staff and their 111 days of captivity. Their struggle to stay alive and their dramatic rescue...
Since its inception, al Qaeda has aspired to create a safe haven in Yemen, where it has operated against U.S. and Yemeni interests. From 2001 to 2004, when Edmund Hull was U.S. ambassador to Yemen, U.S. and Yemeni counterterrorism efforts successfully seized the initiative against al Qaeda, severely degrading its...
By 1990, as the state-controlled Algerian economy careened toward the brink of bankruptcy, its government began to turn away from one-party rule and toward democracy. But after the government canceled an election that Islamist parties were poised to win, the ensuing Islamist insurgency killed as many as 100,000 and threatened...
A detailed chronicle of the working life of an idealistic, action-oriented World War II veteran’s lifelong search for peace through strengthening democracies and the international institutions that unite them.
A memoir of dramatic moments in recent history. On June 4, 1989, Joanne Grady Huskey was in Tiananmen Square and witnessed the horror of a government attacking its own people. On August 7, 1998, she was in the basement of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, with her two small...