Missionary Kids (MKs) have been an important part of my life. My Godfather grew up in China-the son of a missionary MD. My father served on a mission board for over 30 years and missionaries were regular visitors in our home. Generally speaking I have found that while MKs occasionally have problems adjusting to the "we are the only important country in the world" attitude so common in USA, their cross-cultural childhoods usually give them a worldview that is uncommonly sophisticated and nuanced. So I began reading "Born a Foreigner" with high expectations because it was written by the son of missionaries to China.

Unfortunately, not all MKs turn out sophisticated and nuanced. Charles Cross evidently decided that the best way to leverage his childhood experiences was to join the Foreign Service and become what can only be called a professional Ugly American. For example, in the late '60s after losing a bunch of debates while defending the USA's actions in Vietnam, he abandoned his family and a cushy post in England so he could become a part of the "pacification" effort. "Pacification" in Vietnam was a program of assassination, torture, and concentration camps that provoked howls of outrage from virtually every sentient being on the planet. Not surprisingly, almost all the official USA documents on the subject are STILL classified. But does Cross express any regrets about his contributions to massive human rights abuses? Not at all. He does note disapproval from his mother but mostly he decries the lack of pacification's effectiveness.

When Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she was struck by the "banality of evil." Somehow, between professional wrestling and James Bond flicks, we have come to believe that the bad guys are at least interesting. Wrong! Cross's book proves that evil is not merely banal, it is arrogant (he implies that passing a few difficult course at Carleton or Yale are enough to qualify a person to make life-and-death decisions for the yellow folks on earth) clueless (he writes how astonished his missionary aunt was that some of her Chinese students joined the Communist Revolution) and totally lacking in curiosity (he was posted in Indonesia in the period immediately after de-colonialization and all he can write about is the difficulty of getting good servants, the lack of air conditioning, the unruliness of the mobs, and the poor conditions for playing tennis.)

The most that can be said for this dismal memoir about a wretchedly lived life is that it could have been worse...it could have been longer.

Charles T. Cross's, Born a Foreigner presents an intimate look into American diplomacy in Asia. "Chuck" Cross was born in Beijing to American missionary parents, and lived there until he left for college just before World War II. In Marine intelligence in the war, Cross was in the major battles in the Pacific theater, including Saipan and Iwo Jima. After the war and after graduate school at Yale, Cross entered the Foreign Service. Posts starting with Taiwan quickly followed each other: Indonesia right after its independence, Hong Kong, Washington, D.C. during the McCarthy era, Malaya just before independence, and London. From there he was assigned to Vietnam, then back to Singapore as ambassador (1969-1971), Hong Kong as consul general (1974-1977), and finally as the first director of the American Institute in Taiwan. To my mind, Cross's memoir makes two special contributions. First and foremost is his love for China, from his youthful school memories, to when the Marines first entered Peking in the fall of 1945 at the end of the war, to his view of China through the eyes of an American diplomat. As he says, "being born a 'foreigner' in China carries with it a lifetime load of...attitudes, affections, possibly even insights, which I have taken from country to country in Asia." Cross's personal story of his relationship with China gave me new insights into this complex country. A second contribution is Cross's experience and view of Vietnam. Here is a wholly different perspective of our role in that conflict than I, in my twenties in that era, got from the media of the 1960s and 1970s. Cross presents no pat answers to the right or wrong of our involvement. As a senior officer at U.S. headquarters in Danang for two years, including during the Tet Offensive, Cross's assignment was to help strengthen the South Vietnamese people so they would be more resistant to the Vietcong. The 'pacification' program worked hamlet by hamlet to help the people defend themselves, aid in establishing schools and hospitals and to provide relief for the massive number of refugees. Meeting corruption among the district chiefs and political crosscurrents in headquarters, Cross, at the end of his tour there in 1969, assessed their work as "making slow but real progress against the VC." From his base in headquarters, Cross participated in many briefings, explaining his broad views of military and political strategy, but not softening the realities of the war. Looking back on his time in Vietnam, he wrote that never again did he become so emotionally involved with a country and he "began a process of thinking back and forth about Vietnam, which has continued to this day-drawing conclusions and then rejecting them, looking for new and different meanings, finding none...." In 1972, Cross was a "diplomat in residence" at the University of Michigan and experienced first hand the student views of the war, and in the 1980s taught a course on Vietnam at the University of Washington, a subject that most professors did not care to touch. Yet Vietnam has affected all U.S. policy since: Now wars must be short, have clear objectives and predefined endings, must use high-tech firepower from the air to avoid American casualties, and above all, must have public support. Throughout the book, Cross recognizes his wife Shirley's role in their diplomatic assignments as well as her independent accomplishments in teaching wherever they went. In this memoir, Cross has accomplished a remarkable feat of telling the story of American policy through their experiences without boasting. A self-deprecating sense of humor, modesty, and balance come through chapter by chapter and give abstract U.S. foreign policy a human face. I recommend it.

Born a Foreigner was an amazing account of one American's experience as a member of the American presence. It is very personal throughout, but deals with a wide range of events and experiences. It begins and ends in China and covers 80 years of American relations with China and the relations of Americans with Chinese. In between, there is a life as a missionary's son in pre-WWII China under Japanese occupation, the United States Marine Corps in the major WWII battles, including Iwo Jima and 32 years in U.S. Foreign Service. The book is educational and informative, while the person element makes it an interesting read. I highly recommend this book.

Professor Dyer's guide covers "the Land of Israel", meaning the State of Israel and the occupied territories, the "Land of Jordan", meaning Jordan, and "the Lands of the Aegean", meaning a few places in what are currently Greek speaking areas. Egypt and Ur are not included, for some reason. Certainly the Tanakh ("Old Testament") attributes some pretty holy happenings to them. Within these chapters each place includes a brief description and a chronology of its significance in the Christian Bible, with reference limited to those aspects likely to be of interest to American fundamentalist Protestants, rather than Orthodox or Catholic brethren and sisters. The good doctor does not seek controversy in this work, however, and includes two maps with the current political boundaries clearly shown. A separate section of poor quality color photographs even has a couple of figures described as Arabs, though perhaps they are Christians, and in any case are engaged in activities such as winnowing grain and herding sheep, rather than raising Cain.
Prefatory materials are clearly aimed at readers who have never been outside the USA, much less to the Near East, and are not bad so far as they go. Passports, jet lag and weather are covered, though the conversational Hebrew and Arabic are pretty minimal and those few travelers who aspire to talk to the locals in their own languages would be advised to supplement Dr. Dyer's jargon with tapes and phrasebooks. Most, however, will undoubtedly stay close to the bus and have no need for palaver with the natives or recent immigrants of whatever language.
Further aids are included. There is an entire schedule of suggested objects of prayer: good attitudes, the spiritual health and destiny of the bus driver, good weather and much more are among them. Following these hints are special focal points in Bible Study, several pages in fact before the actual Guide commences. And at the end of the book are appended quite a lot of verses (not Biblical ones, but rhymed & metrical stuff), maybe for singing, though there is no musical notation.
There are no materials on accommodations or nightlife, so the traveler will have to see to suchlike some other way. Visitors who are interested in what might have happened since "Biblical" times and are merely perplexed by the evidence they will presumably see around them may want to consider Baedekers or Blue Guides. But Dyer & Hattieburg's Guide will probably be satisfactory to the type of tourist who will buy it.

This book contains information to help one understand just what it is he is seeing, has just seen, or is about to see. Lots of specific type information rather than just general. A real treasure.

I just got back from a 2 week vacation to Israel/Egypt. During the vacation I used this book to mentally prepare the night before for the sites we were going to be seeing the next day. This book was also extremely helpful to have along with you while touring because it offered quick pictures / descriptions / references. There were many times during the tour that our lead pastor borrowed the book to use as a reference before speaking about a site we were visiting. Excellent book.

Smith's book is well documented and well written. However, it falls down as it continually condemns Zionist and later Israeli actions with little mention of Arab activities. A major case in point is the frequent use of the term "Palestinian rage" in reaction to Israeli incursions in and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Nothing is mentioned about any "Israeli rage" after such actions as the murder of the olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. Arab rage is apparently fomented every time Israel beats them in a war (perhaps they should stop trying to fight Israel?), but the result of an Israeli loss would be the total destruction of the nation (as well as a likely repeat holocaust for the jews there). Smith does not acknowledge this state of affairs.
Unfortunately, I have not found a truly balanced book on this subject. Always one side decrying the other. If you know of one, please post...

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I purchased and read it because I saw that it was being used for the "Jews and Arabs in Contact and Conflict" course given at Cornell University.

In the preface Smith states that, "in the early 1980s [he] could not find a satisfactory text to introduce the subject to the college student or the general reader." Over the course of the next 500+ pages one understands Smith's use of the word "satisfactory" here. Smith assures us that he considers "Zionist and Palestinian attitudes."

I should have known right then that this would not be a history in the usual sense of the word. After all, what sort of history is it that considers attitudes? And right at the beginning he sets up the opposing sides, as it were, Zionists and Palestinians. These are both loaded words and Smith knows it.

Smith uses many loaded words: right-wing and right (but almost never left-wing or left), terrorist, and imperialist. Only Jews are right-wing. Apparently there were never any right-wing Arabs. Terrorists, too, are almost always Jewish. Arabs who attack the Jews are insurgents, squads, units, etc. And the imperialists are the Americans!

In a history of Palestine, certain things should appear which Smith omits. One is a map showing the boundaries of the first legal entity known as Palestine issued following the Balfour Declaration. (Up until that time it was merely a region just as Scandinavia is.) That would include all of Israel, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza, and all of Jordan. Those who can read between the lines may pick up on this when Smith refers to the "British Decision in March 1921 to separate Palestine east of the Jordan River," but histories really are not supposed to be like detective novels. Another thing that should appear in a history of Palestine is Mark Twain's description from "The Innocents Abroad," where Twain finds the Holy Land desolate and virtually uninhabited, but this would not be Smith's Palestine where the merciless Zionists displace the indigenous Arabs. And in this book described as "A History with Documents," the Balfour Declaration is curiously difficult to locate unless one already knows what it is. It is NOT included in any of the documents sections that follow each of the chapters.

To Smith the Palestinians are now, and were always, Arabs. He correctly notes that Herodotus uses the word "Palestine," but this was more than a thousand years before anything associated with the word "Arab" even existed. One doesn't have to go back to ancient history though. Readers who go to any of the annual issues of the "New York Times Index," published before the Balfour Declaration and look up "Palestine," will be told, "See: Jews." Smith tells us, "Palestine, as the home of Jesus, was sacred to Christians." Of course, Jesus never thought he lived in Palestine; and Smith's choice of the past tense here is at least interesting.

This is a book with pictures. There is one of an Israeli bulldozer clearing the area in front of the Wailing Wall, and one of "Palestinian Peasants Fleeing from an Unidentified Village." Another shows what looks like an Israeli soldier aiming a rifle at some Palestinian women. Arafat is shown addressing the United Nations looking like an angel. And then there is the subtle cover photograph, probably take in Jerusalem. It shows two Arabs (a majority) walking behind (subserviently) a single Jew. One of the poor Arabs walks with a cane while the other casts a wary eye toward the Jew in front of him.

There are no pictures taken during the siege at the Munich Olympics, or of any of the Arab airplane hijackings. In fact, I don't think the airplane hijackings are mentioned at all. The Olympic Massacre (unindexed) is tangentially mentioned over four lines on one page. But Baruch Goldstein's massacre in Hebron (three index references to five pages) is a prominent event. The massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin (indexed twice) is presented in the worst possible light and presented as a typical, but the massacre of Jews in Hebron (indexed only under Hebron) is briefly mentioned and glossed over. You get the picture.

The way an historian portrays the players is always interesting. For Smith, Arafat is a diplomat, Nasser was a peaceful man who could not control his military, and President Reagan was a foreign policy ignoramus. Israeli leaders are a uniformly deceitful lot when they aren't targeting peaceful "Palestinians." (And why does Smith spell Hussein, as Husayn?!)

There is no bibliography in the usual sense. Smith has what he calls a "Selected Bibliography," which is organized by chapters, and lists books he DID NOT refer to in the footnotes. Still one can learn something from this list. Here is a run of consecutive works cited for Chapters 4 and 5: Swedenburg - Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past; Zadka - Blood in Zion: How the Jewish Guerillas Drove the British Out of Palestine; Heller - The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949; Nevo - Abdullah and Palestine: A Territorial Ambition; and Shapira - Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948. Smith thinks this is balance.

Of course there is no reference to Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, in the footnotes or the "Selected Bibliography." The Peters book would be my recommendation for someone who is genuinely interested in the history of this region called Palestine.

By now you are probably wondering why I rated this book at three out of a possible five stars. I said at the outset that this is a book of breathtaking bias. I was actually sorry when it ended. The creativity of Charles Smith in presenting his "history" continued to amaze me right up until the last page. This book needs to be studied by students as a model of how historical facts can be manipulated and distorted by someone who masquerades as an historian.

"Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict" provides a concise and impartial history of Palestine, a topic which is the subject of much distortion and outright propaganda. Charles Smith, the author, relates the relevant historical facts, without judgemental commentary or extraneous information. His sources for significant facts are thoroughly documented in plentiful footnotes at the end of each chapter, which is probably why this book is often used as a text in university courses.

Smith's factual and scholarly approach to such a sensitive topic contrasts sharply with that of Mitchell Bard, author of the ubiquitous, though propagandistic, "Idiot's Guide to the Middle East Conflict", which sets a new standard for one-sided apologetics. Bard has worked for AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group, and one of the most effective and powerful lobbying groups in America.

Some of the facts impartially reported by Smith invariably collide with popular misconceptions, which probably explains the defensive reactions reflected in some of the above polemical reviews of the book. In summary, if you want to know what events have led to the current situation in Palestine, without judgement of either side, read Smith's book.

Here is another instance of worn-out mythologies being used to justify the ways of Man to men. Doctor (not in the medical sense) Dyer and some of his cronies from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago comfort us with the notion that the present slaughter of the Palestinians fits right into God's Plan for mankind. He makes a joyous hullabaloo, full of Biblical gibberish, to prove that you don't need to know anything more than George W. Bush to understand what's going on in the Middle East. Israel is God's Instrument for bringing about Kingdom Come, in its Protestant fundamentalist version, of course. Rest easy, don't worry about Bin Laden or what kind of mess the Knesset and the United States Congress will make, God will defeat the United Nations and Armageddon us through to a permanent apotheosis of the American suburbs.
What sport Mencken would have had with these people!

In five riviting chapters, Charles Dyer and four other faculty members of The Moody Bible Institute explain the history and the significance of events ocurring in the middle-east today. This short book will give you a clear insight into the underlying reasons for the failure of years of diplomacy to bring an end to the bitter conflict in Israel. The authors help you to understand how today's headlines are setting the stage for the fulfillment of Biblical prohecies regarding Israel and the Church.

If you are confused and troubled by the seemingly impossible task of achieving peace in the middle-east, then, this book is a 'must read' for you. You will be comforted as these gifted scholars help you to see that God is still in control of this chaotic world and that His plan for it is right on track.

This book details several journeys to, and attempts to climb, Sepu Kangri. The chapters are written alternately by Bonington and Clarke, both of whom write engagingly. The alternation of voices keeps the narrative moving. However, I found the book somewhat slow, because much of it concerns the problems of Third World travel, plumbing (or lack thereof) and medicine rather than actual climbing. Readers who are non-climbers, though, may well find this lack of focus on technical mountaineering to be a plus. One certainly does get a good picture of what Tibet and its people are like today. Perhaps one of the book's best features is the lovely photography of some very striking peaks.

After a slow start, where the history of the Sepu Kangri area in Tibet was discussed, the pace picked up as Clarke and Bonington described their intial reconnaissance looking for a way to the mountain and a possible climbing route. The joy of roaming across terrain, essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, comes across in the narrative. I enjoyed reading about their discoveries and meeting the local Tibetan people. The story of the climbs themselves in two different years are not as detailed as in other climbing books, but a feeling for what it was like comes across. It definitely is from a perspective of a sixty-plus year old, yet I can only hope that I am as adventurous and physically able to roam the earth's wild places as Bonington and Clarke still do. The book is similar to Bonington's other books in style. There is no fast-paced, heart stopping, climbing action; but it's a story that I could imagine myself being a part of.

If you are chartering a sailboat around French Polynesia you should get this book or the Cruising Guide book to plan your itinerary. Bring it along and use it too. It helps you navigate, saves you time by pointing out good anchorages, and gives you perspective as to where you are when you are sailing around. If your not sailing, get one of the travel books. Find out which ones by reading my trip report at DiveAtlas.com.

This book is really good in that it helps to explain how weather can effect different things. It also is a great teacher for kindness to others even the small and different. As a mother with a child that has aloepica this book was not really a lot of help in that matter. My 12 year old did lit the book though and love the illstrations in it. They are so righ in color. I also used this in my Jr. High class as we were studying Africa and we thought it would be a neat way to introduce the idea of a drought to the students. The story of the princess not showing kindness to the bird and the results to her was a good lesson. The way the books ends shows that kindness given will be returned. Really all in all it's a good feel good book for all ages.

This is another book by some christians attempting to link the delusional chirstian beliefs to Taoism...Book is also poorly reasearched and written.

It is a quite challenging work to embrace the insights from Taoism for the sake of constructing a new theology for a world Christianity. The difference and distance between Christianity and Taoism is far away. On the other hand, there are many Christians who are struggling to deepen their understanding of God and faith. Then, this book can be a suggestion for those readers.

I found this work to be a superficial treatment of a very complex topic. The study of Muslims in the West has been studied in great detail by Dr. Sami Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh. This work pales by comparison.