Citizenship | Literature
Select novels, short stories, and nonfiction on contemporary life.
Ben East’s nonfiction debut recounts how JFK’s bold experiment shaped diplomatic careers and influenced modern American diplomacy.
The figures highlighted here tracked looted antiquities after the invasion of Iraq, re-established diplomacy in Afghanistan after 9/11, and secured village infrastructure while war raged in Vietnam. As hostages in Iran, they maintained diplomatic discipline to bridge a volatile cultural divide. These are individuals of deep courage and conviction, whether integrating a southern U.S. high school or finding comfort in African village beliefs to cope with personal tragedy.
Read, Listen, Watch
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Representative Chris Collins is acting tough. “Here’s what’s not up for debate,” the New York Republican wrote in Monday’s Washington Post. “From now on, I’ll be exercising my Second Amendment right to carry a firearm as I travel my district.” Collins has some right to feel the need for protection. A gunman went ballistic last…
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The otherwise respectable American Diplomacy, which publishes ‘Foreign Service Despatches and Periodic Reports on U.S. Foreign Policy,’ included my review of of Ambassador James R. Bullington’s Foreign Service Memoir, The Road Less Traveled, in the latest lineup. The memoir recounts a career that started in expeditionary diplomacy for the State Department during the U.S. military…
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Let’s not kid ourselves. Among the many mistakes in Arthur Miller’s talented life (he divorced Marilyn Monroe after just 5 yrs) was his choice of title for The SINGLE GREATEST Story About American History’s Salem Witch Trials. The Crucible. The Crucible? What’s this, Chemistry class? Are we grinding elements here to torch them with a…
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Enough! The past eight days has brought just too much to keep up with. How do you address and condemn one awful imposition on our sanity without condoning all the others by omission? And how can you possibly write up all that condemnation?! This quandary has me in a state of total paralysis. Let me…
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I want loyalty, I need loyalty No writing has influenced my work more than Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Not the Bible. Not the Constitution. Not even The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is a pretty great book and should be thrown full force at anyone who tries to ban it. I wrote my first novel, Two…
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Paul Theroux’s voice in black and white, on the page, captivated me from the start: natural, authoritative, transferring all kinds of observation from the most minute cultural idiosyncrasy to the cruelest cut at character—fictional or real. I started reading him 20 years ago with My Secret History. Until today, I’d known Theroux only through text…
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The ghost of Hillary Clinton had something to say in California this week: “I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean, it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had…
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The latest release from ex-Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren, author of controversial Iraq reconstruction expose We Meant Well, is set during World War Two. We may find ourselves in 1940s Japan, but Hooper’s War aims its barbs dead-center at the contemporary conflagrations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The men and women in Hooper confront the complex ethical decisions of war,…
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After 20 years on the diplomatic beat ex-Foreign Service Officer Matthew Palmer has released his fourth tradecraft thriller: Enemy of the Good. U.S.–Kyrgyz relations are at a critical juncture. The U.S. is negotiating the details of a massive airbase that would significantly expand the American footprint in Central Asia, tipping the scale in “the Great Game”…
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It’s little wonder the hunt for a new FBI Director seems to have ground to a halt. The country’s next top cop will be subservient to a criminal, whose charge sheet includes housing discrimination in NYC, fraud related to an eponymous university, bribery of a federal judge, tax and immigration violations, and sexual predation. This Whitman’s Sampler of criminal…
Ben East Books 