Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1931, and orphaned at an early age, Evelyn Lee Dyer joined the US Foreign Service in the mid-1950s and soon found herself in the heart of the Cold War, among bustling diplomatic communities in Istanbul, Bonn, Prague, Leningrad, Moscow, and Geneva, as well as in Washington, DC, and often in crisis conditions. She tells her story in an unpretentious style, filled with vivid anecdotes and character descriptions, with a feeling for the grand sweep of history as lived through by ordinary people.

There are plenty of Cold War memoirs by public figures, most of them men. This memoir by a working-class Southern woman brings to life an entire generation of postwar Americans, whose destinies followed an upward arc from the regional into the global.