I’m always drawn to books by someone I know, even if only in passing, and my jaw dropped when I read the blurb on the back of this book by Jeff Blackstock, whom I worked with many years ago in the Latin America division at Global Affairs Canada.
This is the true-crime story of how his father, also a diplomat, poisoned Jeff’s mother.
Jeff was only a boy at the time: it took him years to work things out in the face of uncooperative relatives, elusive medical records, and above all, authorities intent on a cover-up.
It has all the ingredients of a Noir thriller – and it’s all true.
If you’re a Canadian over sixty, then you remember where you were when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in the final game of a tense eight-match hockey series that pitted Canada against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
The moment was later featured on a postage stamp. As a junior Canadian diplomat serving in Moscow, Gary Smith – a keen amateur hockey player in his own right – played a key role in putting the series together.
This is a fast-paced, colorful read – with fascinating vignettes of diplomatic life in the Moscow of those days. And its publication is timely as relations between Russia and the West plumb new depths.
Discover a diplomacy mission like no other in Ice War Diplomat, the behind-the-scenes story of the historic 1972 Summit Series.
Amid the tension of the Cold War, caught between capitalism and communism, Canada and the Soviet Union, young Canadian diplomat Gary J. Smith must navigate the rink, melting the ice between two nations skating a dangerous path.
On his first overseas assignment, Smith is tasked with finding common ground and building friendships between the world’s two largest countries. Once in Moscow, he opts for sports diplomacy, throwing off his embassy black tie and donning the blue-and-white sweater of the Moscow…
Up-and-coming fashion journalist Brigid Keenan threw in a promising career to marry – then follow – a European Union diplomat around the world on a series of diplomatic postings in exotic locales.
This is as funny a book as I’ve read in years. When I passed it on to my own spouse (who gamely accompanied me on six postings as a “dependent” from Mexico to South Sudan), I watched her nodding silently in amusement and recognition at one episode after another.
But it’s a serious account, too. The author constantly has to re-invent herself so as to make her life meaningful and rewarding. And when it’s all over, and the couple comes home to a tame retirement with their friends scattered all over the world, they find this is the most challenging assignment of all.
When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, little idea did she have of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together - with most things going horribly awry while being obliged to keep the straightest face and put their best feet forward. For he was a diplomat - and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad. Finding herself miserable for the first time in a career into which many would have long ago thrown the towel, she found…
From 1997 to 2000, I served as a mid-level diplomat at the Canadian Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. This book describes the drug cartels’ dominance of the country at that time, the near-civil war that pitted left-wing guerrilla groups against state-sanctioned paramilitaries, and the plight of civilians caught in the crossfire.
Colombia’s come a long way since that time – it’s no longer "the saddest country" - and a painful but necessary process of reckoning is underway. There is still far to go. But the country’s innovative attempt to achieve truth and reconciliation, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, deserves our support and interest.
Colombia’s recent history holds lessons for all societies struggling to emerge from a dark and violent past.
