Drinking from the Stream

Part action-adventure novel, part political thriller based on historical facts, Drinking from the Stream is set during 1971 and 1972, a time of violent upheaval when the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution marked a generation. The action leapfrogs from Louisiana to London, Paris, and Tanzania in a coming-of-age tale of international youth colliding with post-independence Africa.

Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life.

Richard Scott Sacks holds master's degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and National War College. He is an accomplished US diplomat with decades of experience on five continents. Living, traveling, and working in twenty African countries prior to government service, Mr. Sacks has also reported for the Miami Herald from Asunción, Paraguay, for the Associated Press from Detroit, Michigan, and for The Middlesex News from Framingham, Massachusetts. His nonfiction study coauthored with SAIS professor Riordan Roett, Paraguay: The Personalist Legacy, was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine. Drinking from the Stream is his first novel.