Day: March 4, 2014
Asst Secretary for Consular Affairs Janice Jacobs to Retire Effective April 3
The State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Janice Jacobs announced last week her retirement from from the State Department effective April 3. Ambassador Jacobs was appointed to the CA Bureau on 2008. Previous to this appointment, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Guinea Bissau, accredited at the same time to Senegal and was a resident in Dakar. Excerpt from the announcement email sent to CA folks:
“It has been a wonderful thirty-plus years with the Department of State, serving in many different roles and in
English: Janice L. Jacobs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
many different locations around the world. As many of you have heard me say, my almost six years as Assistant Secretary has been the most enjoyable and the most rewarding of all the positions I have held. I am extremely proud of the role the Bureau has played as a trailblazer in…
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Review of ‘Back from Chaos’
A good sword and sorcery novel has to be a combination of the fantastic with the believable if it is to work. Yvonne Hertzberger’s Back From Chaos, the first book in her Earth’s Pendulum series, has just that – a fantasy world of seers and magic described in a way that makes suspending disbelief an easy task.
I received a free review copy of Back From Chaos, which I started reading on one of the coldest days of this winter, and just after a March snowstorm and plummeting temperatures left me stranded in my suburban home. Turned out to be one of the best ways to deal with being snowbound that I could have come up with.
Kudos to Hertzberger for creating a totally believable world, peopled by characters we can identify with, love, hate – but, most importantly, believe. From Klast, the spy-assassin, who seems to start out as a supporting character, but is in fact central to much of the story, to Marja, the last surviving member of her family after an invading army kills the rest, we’re introduced to people who feel real.
I reserve five-star ratings for books that impress me deeply. Back From Chaos gets an easy five stars.
Charles Ray's Ramblings 