Parker, Richard B.
The late Richard Bordeaux Parker (1923–2011), a thirty-one-year veteran of the Foreign Service, spoke fluent Arabic and climaxed his career in the 1970s as U.S. ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco. Retiring in 1980, he continued to share his deep expertise in Arab culture––as a diplomat-in-residence at the University of Virginia, as editor of the Middle East Journal, and as author of seven books on the region, among them North Africa: Regional Tensions and Strategic Concerns, 1987; The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 1993; The Six-Day War: A Retrospective, 1996; The October War, 2001; and Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History, 2004.
Dick Parker was renowned in the State Department for his dry acerbic wit. From his early youth on U.S. Cavalry posts across the Southwest to his World War II experiences, through a successful Foreign Service career as a leading Arabist in the Near East, he observed and commented on everything.
In this autobiography...
In Uncle Sam in Barbary, Richard Parker tells the story of the young American republic’s first hostage crisis, and earliest encounter with Islam, which began in 1785 when Algerine corsairs–the Barbary pirates–captured two U.S. vessels off the coast of Portugal. The situation dragged on until 1796, when the United States paid...
This often surprising book shares firsthand accounts and frank discussions from a meeting held in October 1998 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israeli army positions in the Sinai and Golan. Twenty-five scholars and senior officials, former and current, searched for answers to persistent questions about...