In this blend of memoir and how-to guide, a man details his career as a diplomat in hopes of inspiring others to follow in his footsteps.

There are two ways to become an ambassador for the United States, explains Armbruster wryly at the beginning of this volume. One is to get rich, support a winning presidential candidate, and accept your appointment as a reward for your efforts. The second, more satisfying way is to rise through the Foreign Service. Using his own story to illustrate the process, the former ambassador to the Marshall Islands steers would-be diplomats through a career of international relations: “This book is for those of you who are curious about the world, and sure that there is a place for you in the international firmament. Why not ambassador? I hope this proves to be a little bit of a flight plan for you on how to get there. In today’s uncertain world, I know one thing, we need you.” A childhood fan of Homer’s country-hopping Odyssey, Armbruster got his first chance to live abroad at age 17 when he served as a nanny for a diplomat stationed in Moscow. The author got married right after college and—just for the fun of it—spent his honeymoon with his new wife, Kathy, on a Yugoslavian freighter bound for Casablanca. After several years of working as a journalist in Hawaii, he sat for the Foreign Service exam at 30. He was sworn in and given his first assignment: Helsinki. Subsequent tours included Havana; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Kabul; and even the North Pole. Each assignment was a learning experience, but more importantly, each was a grand adventure for an idealist who loved to travel and serve his country.

Armbruster succeeds in demystifying the process of becoming a diplomat, which is—in his description—much more achievable than many might suspect. Readers will enjoy his encounters across the globe, from trying to get a bridge built faster in Tajikistan to dealing with the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The accounts are marbled with self-deprecating humor: “I smiled and said, ‘Are those your parents?’ I could see Kathy bury her face in her hands. The Consul General drew himself up to full attention, ‘No. That is the emperor and empress of Japan.’ ” The spine of the book is an interview Armbruster gave Mark Tauber of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The author uses his answers as a jumping-off point for more detailed discussions of his experiences. This contributes, in part, to the book’s somewhat fragmentary structure, in which information is frequently repeated and the narrative lurches forward and backward in time. Armbruster only half commits to the how-to dimension of the book, making the work’s didacticism somewhat awkward—a traditional memoir would likely have achieved the same purpose. That said, he is a concise and amusing storyteller, and he certainly makes a career in the State Department sound tempting.

A messy but illuminating look at life in the Foreign Service.

In this coda to Homer’s famous epic, Armbruster imagines Odysseus’ attempt to realize a dead man’s prophecy.

Odysseus is home after his 20 years of war and voyaging—but not for long. He still has a prophecy to fulfill, one spoken to him by the ghost of Tiresias during his sojourn in the Underworld. Odysseus is fated to leave Ithaca carrying an oar and walk until he comes to a place where the denizens do not recognize the object. His long-suffering wife, Penelope, insists on going with him—after so many years apart, she isn’t about to let him out of her sight again—though Odysseus, interpreting Tiresias’ words as a sort of divine death sentence, is hesitant to bring his wife along. Another problem: Which way are they meant to go? “I don’t know whether to go east or west, north or south,” muses the baffled wanderer. “Certainly, nowhere in Greece since we are all sailors and know exactly what an oar is. We have sea water in our veins.” With their son, Telemachus, ruling in his stead, Odysseus sets off with Penelope, his aged father, Laertes, and their dog, No Man (so named to remind Odysseus of his ill-advised taunting of a certain Cyclops), along with a crew of questionable loyalty to locate some interior country inhabited by people ignorant of the sea. Soon, Odysseus, Penelope, and No Man find themselves alone on a foreign shore—a place of vast pyramids and monstrous beasts, where everyone (or at least a high percentage of the people they encounter) is trying to kill them. They escape through a combination of Odysseus’ wits and Penelope’s endless resourcefulness, but beyond that land is another, then another. The old trickster soon discovers that his second journey may cover even more ground than his first odyssey—and its ending may prove just as difficult to reach.

Armbruster borrows some of the familiar language of Homer (“the wine dark sea,” “the rosy fingers of dawn”) while transporting Odysseus into lands beyond the Mediterranean basin. “The spices were so intense he wanted to get up from the floor and run around, waving at his mouth,” the author writes of the hero’s trip to the Indian subcontinent. “Penelope fared better, but she too broke out in a sweat every night eating food that the children thought nothing of. For No Man the only drawback was the largely vegetarian diet.” (There are some anachronisms—avocados and camels in ancient Africa, potato wine in Old Russia—but the author generally tries to keep things in the mythological register of the Homeric Age.) The book’s short, 96-page length is both a feature and a bug: It makes for a quick read, but it cannot hope to compare with the original in scope or complexity. The story begins promisingly enough by building on organic tensions between the characters—Penelope even chastises Odysseus for slaying the servant girls who aided the suitors at the end of the Odyssey—but once the pair reaches foreign lands, the novel begins to feel like a more generic travel narrative, with little beyond its loose connection to the original work to hold the reader’s interest.

An abbreviated and ultimately underwhelming addition to one of history’s greatest stories.