Encounters: A Lifetime Spent Crossing Cultural Frontiers

"What a story, told with verve, insight, and a sense of history I suspect it of being a classic." Mark Peattie, Stanford University. "One of the most fascinating and unusual memoirs I have ever read." Doug Merwin, MerwinAsia. A carefree child of expatriate parents at age 10, a prisoner of the Japanese at 16, a valued source of intelligence to the U.S. military at 19, and a fervent advocate of public diplomacy throughout his long career as a Foreign Service Officer, Clifton Forster spent his life crossing and recrossing frontiers, determined to use dialogue, not conflict, to solve differences between nations. In 2007, a year after her husband's death, Nancy Forster began to sort through the wealth of papers Cliff had tucked away in a Japanese tea chest, and to reexamine her own memories and writings from nearly 60 years of shared international adventures. Her compelling memoir could serve as a blueprint for a U.S. government newly dedicated to building bridges across frontiers.

Nancy Keeney Fortser shared the adventures and absorbed the stories of Clifton Forster for nearly six decades. Together, they journeyed across cultural frontiers from California to the Philippines, Japan, Burma, Washington, D.C., Israel, Hawaii, and back to California. During those years, Forster developed her own career as an educator in international schools and an administrator, inspector, and director in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. She lives in Tiburon, California.