4 comments about Rob Roy (Canongate).

1. This is an elegantly written, thorough, balanced and fascinating account of a deservedly highly admired man.

   The author provides a comprehensive historic and social background and a detailed biography. Real history, not the current hip Celtic fashion or Braveheart drivel.

   I found the book moving and inspiring. A picture of an honourable, intelligent and courageous man, living his life by the laws of his time; a man who deserves to be remembered.

   The film Rob Roy with Liam Neeson, runs amazingly close to this book. If you were inspired by the film, I think you will greatly enjoy this biography.

   I'd also recommend John Prebble for his classic works on Culloden and Glencoe and the Highland Clearances.




2. This is a book for a scholar or a person dipping into Scottish history for the first time. An excellent book about Highlanders and there are precious few books available on the topic. The author has considered vast quanitities of sources; the only books lacking are Gaelic language sources such as those bilingual editions published by the Scottish Academic Texts Society. The author shows a broad understanding of the politics and economics of the period; what is unique is an attempt to understand Gaelic society. The "creach" or cattle raid is explained from a Highland point of view; it's a custom sanctified in the great Gaelic epic "Táin Bó Cuailgne". The format is very appealing as historical events are related to the colourful life of this one honourable man.



3. A fascinating biography. This book inspired the film with Liam Neeson, but is so much more than a glimpse of the incidents chronicled in the film. W.H. Murray has given a well-researched, well-documented look at highland life that enables the reader to step into the shoes (or lack thereof) of the Scottish highlander. Everything from the clan structure, rivalries, English oppression, how to carry a handful of oats dipped in a stream for daily ration; it's all there. Mr. Murray gives us very detailed information on the subtleties of the constantly changing political climate and the MacGregor's sense of injustice.

   This book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in Scotland, the MacGregor Clan, or Rob Roy himself.




4. Murray does a great job of telling us about the true Rob Roy MacGregor (versus the tarted up Sir Walter F. Scott rendition to quote an English friend friend of mine)! Murray explains clearly the politics of the time in England, and the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland: Christianity (Catholicism and Protestantism); the Whigs and the Torys; etc. He gives a vivid depiction of the Highland way of life from the daily routine to engaging in commerce amongst local Highland clans, the Lowlanders, and England. Let's not forget "abduction" of live-stock for which Rob Roy in particular was well-noted. There is even information on the materials used in the dying of kilt and tartan plaids. The impression one gets is that if the Highlanders were left alone to continue their way of life, who knows how wonderfully it would have evolved and what contributions they could have made to the world. Murray is given extra credit here because he had to re-start this writing while in a Nazi POW camp. A must read for all who are interested in all things Scottish!

3 comments about Pinstripes and Reds: An American Ambassador Caught Between the State Department and the Romanian Communists, 1981-1985.

1. The author recounts the process by which he was nominated & confirmed to be US ambassador to Communist Romania. Interesting insight into the inside workings of the State Department, as well as life in Ceausescu's Romania. An important historical text.



2. David Funderburk--the former history professor at the hardline Baptist Campbell University, one-term US Representative from rural North Carolina, protege of Sen. Jesse Helms and former Ambassador to Romania in the early '80s--is in the mold of those Red-baiters of the early '50s. He denouces the State Department as communist sympathizers and throughout the book belies his extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist ideology. He is certainly correct that the Ceausescu regime was horrid, but that was not due to the State Department. His solution, end detente with all communists, has been tried time and again with failure. Funderburk obviously harbors a deep insecurity about his less than stellar academic career and that he was ostracized by everyone in the foreign policy making apparatus from George Schultz on down. If any book deserves less than a star, this is it.



3. ...this book does...provide a disturbing look inside the State Department and other areas of the US government vis a vis Romania.
   Romania was given a political "free ride" for many years by the US. This was because of cheap and shallow political gestures against the Soviet Union made by Romania, such as sending athletes to the Olympics during the Soviet boycott. Meanwhile, the regime did Moscow's bidding where it really counted and also repressed the Romanian people to devistating extremes.
   This book provides useful insight into many of the outrageous actions by the Romanian government and US refusal to do anything meaningful about it.

No comments about El hombre de hierro.

5 comments about My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.

1. Norman Podhoretz' billet-doux to the country who has given him so much is an enthralling read occasionally marred by desultory digressions.

   Like all long lasting marriages, this love affair went through periods of turbulence, but even when he felt instances of temptation, he was true to his citizenship and never gave into infidelity. Such inveterate loyalty did not extend to his politics. Once an avowed liberal, "Commentary's" long time editor maturated into as the subtitle declares "a cheerful conservative." Still, his devotion to his homeland remained steadfast regardless of where he was on the political scale. One of the salient disillusionments he found with liberalism was the ignominious tendency to badmouth America. Acts of such betrayal outraged Mr. Podhoretz and no doubt gave increased impetus to his propitiation toward conservatism.

   This love letter warns of a similar concern more recently seen from the right, but this is one area where the supporting evidence is weak. Except for the discussion of a controversial seminar and a handful of other morsels, this charge remains rather unsubstantiated. Certainly, nothing is given that equates to the sixties radicals offering vainglorious aid and comfort to the Vietcong.

   It should also be noted that Mr. Podheretz wisely does not see justified, severe criticism of the government as a lack of faithfulness to the nation. He was one of the many eclectic movers and shakers (ranging from Clinton/Gore cheerleaders Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence Tribe to conservative icons William Bennett and incoming Secretary of Labor Linda Chavez) who gracefully signed the brilliant syndicated ad urging the supine congress to take some action against Clinton, Reno, and company for the savage incursion and kidnapping perpetrated on the noble Gonzales family that infamous Easter weekend. Despite the natural umbrage he felt by this execrable breach committed by her opprobrious government, his allegiance to his beloved America was not diminished.

   In this zeitgeist where patriotism and fidelity are routinely belittled, this tale of mutual honor and approbation stands as an example to be emulated.




2. Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was the need to reassert American
   nationalism or patriotism or "Americanism" or "American exceptionalism": the idea that American
   society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior to other
   societies.

   [This idea] is especially associated with immigration. The future neoconservatives mostly came
   from relatively recent immigrant stock. It is arguable, though certainly unproven, that such people
   in America feel a stronger need than those of longer American lineage to display their credentials
   as Americans; or rather, that those whose families came over on the Mayflower feel that there is
   nothing incompatible between deep patriotism and a propensity to shout about what needs to be
   changed.
   -The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
   (1996) (Godfrey Hodgson)

   Boy, Godfrey Hodgson really hits the nail on the head there. Norman Podhoretz's book, My Love
   Affair With America, is basically a protracted attempt to suggest that he loves America more than any
   of his former rivals on the Left, or current rivals on the Right. Podhoretz famously broke ranks with
   the intellectual New York set in the 1970's, having determined that their anti-Americanism, most
   ostentatiously displayed during the Vietnam War, neither jibed with his own life experiences--the
   meteoric rise of a poor Jewish child of immigrants to respected writer status--nor was compatible with
   the need to maintain a militarily strong and assertive America, to stand as a final guarantor of an
   embattled Israel's continued existence. He has an easy time rewinning his old battle with the radical
   counterculture (though he's unable to resist the compulsion to claim credit for having created that
   counterculture in the first place). Their anti-Americanism is a result of their genuine opposition to
   freedom, which is America's organizing principle. They do not wish to perfect America, but to
   destroy it and remake it in an image of their utopian (or dystopian) fantasies. Podhoretz gives them
   yet another well-deserved drubbing.

   But then he takes on the modern Right, and here he founders badly :

   In the mid-1990s there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of
   the very conservatives I thought had been permanently immunized against it...I was already pushing
   seventy, and it made me a little tired to think of going back into combat over a phenomenon that I
   had fondly imagined I would never have to deal with again, and certainly not on the Right

   The anti-Americanism he's talking about is the harsh, but loving, cultural criticism of Bill Bennett and
   Robert Bork, and the tentative suggestions on the Religious Right that the Supreme Court may have so
   far departed from the Constitution in its decisions on social issues, specifically abortion and
   Church/State issues, that it is no longer a legitimate institution. Podhoretz is horrified by these trends
   and seeks to read them out of the Conservative movement, but they were there long before him and
   will remain long after.

   The problem for Podhoretz, and for neoconservatism in general, is the absence of a core political
   philosophy. The Left believes that the central duty of government is to guarantee equality of
   outcomes among the citizenry and that government is capable of solving social problems and
   effectively running the economy. Classic Conservatism is structured around a countervailing belief in
   freedom, which necessitates a very limited government, but strong social institutions, and, though it
   requires equality of opportunity, accepts that the resulting outcomes will be very different.
   Neoconservatism is really only interested in supporting Israel and opposing quotas, it's largely agnostic
   on the other issues and has no firm view of the proper role of government generally. On social issues,
   a natural distrust of Christian conservatism and the fact that neoconservatism arose in the urban milieu,
   combine to create a willingness to countenance big government, and the need for a massive military
   requires big government. On the other hand, if equality is enforced by the state, it will work to the
   detriment of groups, like Jews, who are disproportionately successful, so there's a reluctance to trust
   government too far. This naked self-interest is certainly legitimate, but it's hardly a coherent political
   philosophy.

   That Podhoretz is only marginally conservative becomes clear from the fact that he almost completely
   ignores the question of the size and role of government, from his dismissal of objections to the 1964
   Civil Rights Act, from his failure to discuss, except in passing, the free market economic philosophy
   of folks like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and from his failure to comprehend why abortion is
   such a salient issue on the Right. Even more revealing is his thinly disguised contempt for the
   conservative intellectuals of the first half of the century, who either go unmentioned (Albert Jay Nock,
   for example) or are dismissed as cranks (like the Agrarians--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, etc.).
   He seems to think that conservatism was born in the 1950s, only became a significant political
   movement in the post Vietnam era (not coincidentally, just after he joined it) and consists of little
   more than nationalism.

   Were that true, were conservatism nothing more than a blind patriotism, of recent vintage, then he
   would be right to criticize cultural conservatives for questioning the moral climate of the country and
   the direction in which it is heading. But conservatism, even American conservatism, antedates
   America. And conservatism has endured precisely because it offers such a powerful critique of
   America. In Albert Jay Nock's great book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he says the following :

   Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. 'For us to love our country,' he
   said, 'our country ought to be lovely.' I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on
   which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich,
   prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It
   can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the
   irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the
   society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly
   consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

   By economism, Nock means a kind of unfettered materialism or consumerism. These lines, prophetic
   anyway, seem even more prescient in light of the events of September 11th. There is a palpable sense
   in America's continuing discussion of the events that the America that died on September 11th
   deserved to die (though the victims certainly did not), that it was too self-centered, too trivial, too
   degenerate. People have now judged the America of the 1990s, which Podhoretz is here defending
   against conservative critics, and, as W. H. Auden said of an earlier time, they have determined it to be
   "a low dishonest decade."

   In the final pages of the book Podhoretz offers a dayyenu, a list of each of the things that would have
   been sufficient for us to owe America a debt of gratitude. After a brief, and platitudinous, generic list,
   including such things as "domestic tranquillity" (which one is tempted to point out that China too
   enjoys), he gets to his real reasons for feeling patriotic, and they are all about the success he's made of
   himself : "...America...sent me to a great university..."; "...America handed me a magazine of my own
   to run..."; "...America saw to it that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan..."; "...America
   arranged for me to build a country house...". It's utterly vacuous and truly appalling.

   Freedom is vital to everything that America stands for. It makes possible the kind of rags to riches
   story that Podhoretz has lived. But it is not enough. Conservatives demand freedom, but also believe
   that our country "ought to be lovely." This loveliness consists mostly of an adherence to the eternal
   values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which, as Nock says, we are unworthy inheritors. And right
   there is another key element, humility. Conservatives realize that our inheritance is too precious to
   experiment with willy-nilly and so seek to conserve as much as can possibly be conserved of that
   tradition. Paraphrasing Nock (one last time, I promise), who borrowed a phrase from Lord Falkland :

   What it is not necessary to




3. Podhoretz writes with intimacy and frankness. His experience as the child of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn and ultimately becoming a conservative is what should be a logical conclusion of so many more lives than New York peer pressure typically allows. A great example of someone with the wisdom to get past the elitist hangups of the NYC intelligentsia who instead followed his heart to the truth. A gentle read, and an overall pleasure!



4. I find Podhoretz to be a pitiable unimpressive individual, a bitter pathetic old man. He recently stated on Fresh Air with Terry Gross that he has no friends who disagree with him. He lamented this as if to blame it on others stating that politics are the new religion and this is why the polarization in this country exists as it does. If for no other reason it is for the cavalier disregard he expresses for human life. One cannot find intolerance unless one is himself intolerant. I have many people who call me friend whom I disagree with on political issues.
   
   Podhoretz and those who embrace the sick and twisted vision of "neoconservativism" are themselves more dangerous and fanatical than those they are seeking to defeat. If Podhoretz and his fellow neocons are what America has become than America must surely fail, in Iraq and elsewhere. They have debased and perverted what they claim they are seeking to defend. There is nothing noble in the unenlightened neoconservative vision of American hegemony.
   
   No one in America has learned any lessons from the events of Sept 11, 2001 because no one has as yet examined the genuine cause for the behavior of terrorists. The past half century of American foreign policy has been one of nothing but blatant hypocrisy.
   
   I wouldn't gratify the perpetrator of these insane ramblings by giving him any money for this or anything else he or any of his fellow conspirators have written and neither should anyone else.



5. Norman Podhoretz, the wise, puckish sage of NAMBLA, has come out with a new collection of homespun wisdom. I don't necessarily agree with his suggestion that America put its defense department "in a blind trust" under the direction of Israel, although it is refreshing to hear a prominent Neo-Con admit his secret intentions. Nor will most readers find the same pleasure in watching animals eat their young that seems to arouse Podhoretz so profoundly. But the wonderful memoir -- "From Brownsville to Brownsville" -- a tale of Podhoretz's long ride, most of it on a pogo stick, from Brooklyn to Texas -- ought to move anybody who has yearned to "make it" himself.

No comments about Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada: A Biography (Wilber S. Shepperson Series in Nevada History).

2 comments about Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents.

1. I was extremely happy with this book. Wonderfully written, it provided a deep and meaningful historical background to the upcoming election, which will clearly be defined by its moderate nominees.
   
   I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American political history, or with an interest in the 2008 election. It is an extremely engaging account of moderate presidents, and why they were successful. How timely!



2. Bravo Mr. Troy!
   
   What a dynamic read, what a tour de force! Once again, Gil Troy brings his poetic talents to the realm of american political history, and gives us another masterpiece. Whether you agree with his positions or not, you cannot help but be enthralled by his style and respect his talent for debate.
   
   Leading from the Center is a must-read for anyone with an interest in our country's great political traditions. Not only will you learn much about this timely topic, but you'll have fun doing it!

No comments about Brothers in War.

5 comments about Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath.

1. Ian Smith was a man ahead of his times. His view of the inept leadership that Africans have offered their continent is correct.

   It's too bad that inevitably down the road the so called "rich countries" will have to bail that country, with or without Magabe.

   We shouldn't help. Let them lie in the bed they have made.




2. Truely the greatest betrayal of a nation by the Western Democratic countries under the influence of the Organisation of African Unity. This book besides being a great read, depicts the struggle of a nation coming to grips with a change in British foreign policy. This change strikes the beginning of the end of a democratic and economically prosperous country. The sad reality of this book is that all of the Rhodesian peoples worst fears have today come true. Ian Smith lays the facts straight. A true leader, and a hard to find honest politician struggling against innumerable odds to keep Rhodesia alive. Unfortunately in the end it was not to be and the now Zimbabwe is a single party dictatorship with horrendous human rights violations, collapsed economy, and a starving people.

   If you have any interest in the politics of Southern Africa during the end of British colonialism, this book is for you.




3. You've got to hand it to Ian Smith, he doesn't give up. Unfortunately, with Robert Mugabe massacring people left, right and centre people sometimes start to give Smith's arguments and rewriting of history credit they do not deserve.

   In the world of Ian Smith as he would have you look at it, hearty Rhodesian farmers held the land in trust for grateful, happy blacks, while putting in place a slow and gentle programme of steady reform which would gradually empower a black population who were clearly not in any position to responsibly govern a great country. Meanwhile, he was brutally sold down the river by the mother country (Britain) who got foolhardy liberal ideas about self-determination and black empoerment.

   The reality is somewhat different. Smith's regime has the dubious honour of outdoing Apartheid South Africa in the unpleasantness stakes. Smith's [associates] lived the high life while disenfranchised blacks were used for ... labour and segregated from white society. The failure of post-colonial governments such as Robert Mugabe's has aroused a new debate about the merits of a "benevolent colonialism." Whatever the merits of this argument, it's pretty academic because Smith's government was in no way "benevolent" and could never be held up as one of the better examples of colonial management. In fact, it could be a case study in ... abuse of power. What reforms the Smith regime implemented were hollow and deliberately rigged to make no real difference. Herculean efforts were made to stall the emergence of a well educated, politically aware black middle class which might ultimately challenge white rule. And if any of the "kaffirs" got too uppity they could always be dragged off to a cell to have electrodes attached to their privates until they changed their minds. Of course, this all came back to bite the Smith government in the backside because when it came to a shooting war, even moderate blacks had no real stake in preserving the status quo and little incentive to fall in behind the government.

   During the run-up to the negotiations which resulted in the handover to black rule, Smith (who was acknowledged by everyone who dealt with him as a foul mouthed thug) toured London lecturing parties of the hard right faithful on the importance of teching the blacks to "know their place". Willie Whitelaw, not an ungenerous judge of character, described him as possibly the most unpleasant man he'd ever met. Don't be lured by the revisionist nonsense about a paternalistic, essentially benevolent regime. It was nothing of the sort.




4. Few books detail the truth about Mugabe's Zimbabwe and the virtual ethnic cleansing of minority communities. Smith, the last minority president of Zimbabwe(then rhodesia) tells the story behind the UDA and his fight for moderation. This excellent book is an insider look at Smith's own understanding of his country and the fate of his nation. Zimbabwe, once a net exporter of grain, is now on the brink of starvation. Smith's book is readable and sheds light on what has been proven by history, the terrible suffering of Zimbabwe's people under the near-fascist dictatorship of Mugabe.

   Seth J. Frantzman




5. This book is not a correct account of what happened in Rhodesia, but a correct account of what some people in power thought was happening. In some areas Mr. Smith was incredibly wrong, but in others he was very right. The western countries rubber stamp system of de-colonization allowed some very bad rulers to come to power, much worse than Botha or Smith could ever be. In principle I understand what Smith was doing, but he should have agreed to the UK's demands earlier. The only result of this positively is that South Africa learned alot from his mistakes.
   
   As long as you don't believe every single word, this is a great insightful book. I agree with Smith on his take that Rhodesia made a terrible mistake by not joining the Union of South Africa, thereby allowing the 1948 election to happen there.
   
   Regardless what has happened to Zimbabwe/Rhodesia is sad, and the west and later Africa should of never let it happen.
   
   I highly suggest reading "Tomorrow is another country," by Martin Meredith for what I think is the best account of Rhodesia's story.

No comments about Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl.

4 comments about Our Man in Belize: A Memoir.

1. Our Man in Belize is the story of Belize before satellite TV, before tourism, and before crack.

   In 1959, Richard Timothy Conroy, something of state department misfit, was posted as U.S. vice consul to British Honduras, a lowly job in one of the backwaters of the diplomatic world. Two years later, one of the worst hurricanes of the century would strike an unprepared Belize. Out of this mixture of colonialism and disaster, Conroy builds an entertaining, fanciful memoir of life when the driving was still on the left. Or, as likely as not, in the middle.

   The just-arrived vice consul recounts a trip into the Belize City of 40 years ago:

   "The car crunched over the land crabs that had crawled onto the road to enjoy the last heat of the day ... The two-mile drive into Belize along Princess Margaret Drive was a drive into another century. Out at the racetrack, the few houses, for all their bleak shabbiness, had a cheap modern look. A failed subdivision on the edge of an abandoned town in a small country with unsupportable pretensions .... The old part of Belize presented, as we entered, a certain harmony of man, dog, and environment. Even shabby charm ... But the big difference was the number of inhabitants in the streets. The desolation that had so marked the new settlements was replaced by a town teeming with life, on foot, paw, and bicycle as well as rooted in the salty ground."

   Conroy quotes U.S. state department reports of the time that the country has "a road going west, and a road going north; both going nowhere." He reports, too, that except for the Fort George Hotel, Government House, and a few houses in the British section which had piped-in water, most of the city collected its water in cisterns "with the occasional rat or cat for body and flavor." He tells of some of Belize's great eccentrics: "Paddy," who would filch the American consulate's copy of The New York Times, and then, after removing all his clothes to wash them in the sea, would sit naked on the public seawall reading The Times while his clothes dried. And of "Bugger," a chess-playing Polish physician who always wanted to go to Africa, so when offered a position in Belize City, he quickly accepted, learning only after he was half-way there that Belize wasn't in Africa.

   After his British Honduras post, Conroy did a tour in Vienna, then left the state department for the Smithsonian Institution. Happily for us, Conroy's time in government work didn't ruin his knack for a good story. He's published three mystery novels and can tell a tale with the best of them.

   Witness: The sedate dinner party when giant roaches, attracted by the candlelight, drop from the ceiling into the gazpacho, or the story of a fool-proof method for stopping the cook from stealing your scotch.

   That these stories have, as the author admits, taken on a life of their own, are perhaps as much fantasy as fact, does not at all detract. Such recasting of reality, however, is likely behind Conroy's irritating and otherwise unexplainable habit of changing the names of nearly everybody, and even of some cities and countries, long after most of these people are gone and the events forgotten.

   Some old Belize hands, including those who knew him personally, take exception to Conroy's tales. It is not, after all, always a flattering memoir. He tells of the petty stupidities of the U.S. government and of the bunglings of both the British and the local Creole establishments, albeit disguising the identities of the participants. Conroy revels in juicy and unflattering gossip. He reports, for example, the story of the long-time Belize City department store owner who, after getting a nice settlement from the insurance company on losses from Hurricane Hattie and the looting afterwards, piled his Rover full of cash and drove north to the Mexican border, outrunning a customs inspector on a bicycle and violating British currency exchange regulations then in force.

   More significantly, Conroy also could be faulted for focusing on the details, however amusing, of personal discomforts and calamities caused by Hurricane Hattie, rather than on the human tragedy the hurricane caused. Hattie struck on the night before Halloween 1961, killing more than 400 Belizeans and destroying much of Belize City. Conroy gives short shrift to the misery of homeless Belizeans in the shacks of Hattieville (which Conroy misidentifies as the site of Belmopan, the new capital) yet lightheartedly claims that after Hurricane Hattie young girls in Belize stopped wearing underwear, in a primordial reproductive reaction to a natural disaster. With an irreverent nod, however, to Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana and a wave to the captivating scoundrels of In the Garden of Good and Evil, Conroy's is the kind of memoir which, to paraphrase William Powell as Nick Charles in Shadow of the Thin Man, we enjoy no other kind than.

   Conroy says he has not been back to Belize since 1963 and proposes that today's Belize he would not even recognize. He suggests that Hurricane Hattie may have been, as it were, a watershed in Belize's history, the turning point from the old colonial backwater past to self-government and a move to a new order of politics and business on a wider stage. The final laugh of this memorable memoir, this one on Vice Consul Conroy himself, may be that the Belize of the 1950s, with its entertaining eccentrics, bordellos, heavy drinkers, comic politicians, inept diplomats, dope airstrips in the bush, auto-theft rings, and port thieves, is not that much different from the Belize of 1998.




2. Conroy is funny and the book is very readable, but I didn't give him a higher rating because I didn't think he tried very hard to know the people of Belize, or the country itself. He has a lot to say, all true, about the poverty and the governmental inefficiency when he was there, but didn't notice any of the natural beauty or the native culture(s) in this unique little place. He got really distressingly cold-blooded when he wrote about Hurricane Hattie, a tragedy in which there was great loss of life, and seemed mostly concerned that he wrecked his boots! If you want to know Belize, I would recommend that you read Zee Edgell's fine book BEKA LAMB, which is a nice antidote for Conroy's fin-de-colonialism attitude in this book. Conroy's attitude is reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh in this book, but although he is (almost) as cruel, he is not half so funny.



3. I thoroughly enjoyed this book because I read it as a foreign service adventure commentary, NOT as a travel log of Belize. As a daughter of a foreign service officer and as an avid listener of f.s. stories thereof, I chuckled about the various snafus, ridicula, and adventures of this young man and his family on their first post.



4. Nobody would read this book to learn about Belize or the casualties left by Hurricane Hattie. This memoir belongs to the category of Foreign Service Tales -- like Durrell's "Esprit de Corps." Laughter helps you survive almost anything, even working for the consul from Hell. Although I wish Conroy had focused exclusively on his time in Belize -- because that's where the action is -- memoirs do tend to meander, like real life, and anybody who ever worked in a consulate will recognize Conroy's predicament.