An informative, behind-the-scenes look at one black woman’s rise through the ranks of the Foreign Service when few others...
How a young black woman from Boston rose to a long, distinguished career in foreign service.
In this highly detailed autobiography, Elam-Thomas (Director, Diplomacy Program/Univ. of Central Florida), with co-author Robison, shares her life story, from her childhood in Boston all the way through the ranks of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service. Overall, she spent 42 years as a diplomat around the world. The author, who is younger than her siblings by almost two decades, narrates her family’s early history, from her great-grandparents, who might have been slaves, to her parents’ first meeting to the accomplishments of her siblings, before jumping into her own life. At Simmons College in 1962, Elam-Thomas was accepted into the Experiment in International Living’s Student Exchange Program and lived in Lyon for the summer, which expanded her view of the world and planted the seed that would lead her into life as a diplomat. She worked in the Nixon administration as assistant cultural affairs officer in Senegal, then moved on to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and many other assignments before returning to act as ambassador to Senegal. Throughout her world experiences, she continued to learn from the people and cultures she encountered, especially regarding the importance of listening. “I know that listening is the most effective approach to meaningful dialogue in any setting,” she writes. “Listening is an art….It is called respect. It is called appreciation. It is called anticipation. And it is called leadership.” Throughout, Elam-Thomas includes anecdotal moments that help break up the dry recounting of the sometimes-extraneous details of her decades of service (she retired in 2005). For those interested in becoming diplomats, the book effectively shows the high standards required.
An informative, behind-the-scenes look at one black woman’s rise through the ranks of the Foreign Service when few others like her were serving as diplomats.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-950-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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