The Best Damn Ice Cream in the World

The reader is treated to a torrent of dead-on metaphors and similes, as his imagination catches fire. Yet, his dash and panache are employed not merely to entertain. Jim's bizarre, serio-comic, sweaty, account of life in one of the most unromantic diplomatic backwaters imaginable, his fictional Mogrebia, is a madcap but believable view of a proxy outpost during the Cold War years of the 1970s. He certainly knows his history and the historic figures with which he judiciously peppers his novel. Jim brings to an ingenious plot his mordant humor and laser-like powers of observation of people, their physical, emotional and unconscious tics of personality and behavior. All the while his story rests on a solid, first hand knowledge of assignments from hell holes to posh posts, revealing how the foreign service works from the inside out