Our man in Vienna

"The wit and charm that marked Our Man in Belize enliven Richard Timothy Conroy's new diplomatic memoir about a posting that couldn't have a more different location. But the wheels of lower-level diplomacy, it turns out, turn at the same rate whatever the setting. Plucked from the coast of Central America and put down in post-World War II Vienna, land of Der Rosenkavalier and whipped-cream cakes, Conroy still was "not mentioned in dispatches" (or, at least, not in complimentary ones), but even a lowly vice-consul can do some good in people's lives.". "Take, for example, his effort to help a woman flee Vienna after she reported that Communists were sneaking into her room each night and slicing off little bits of her foot. Or the unfortunate Austrian whose visa application had been rejected three previous times, with no explanation. Conroy discovered that the application had a photograph of the man wearing a Red Army sergeant's uniform. The man had conned a gullible Red Army soldier into lending him the uniform for a snapshot, which he then used to make an equally gullible group of Russian border guards think that he was an undercover Red agent posing as (what he really was) an export-import businessman. Nobody before Conroy had bothered to ask for an explanation.". "In between similar tales of diplomatic deeds and misdeeds, the author gives his readers an inimitable take on the Vienna of those days. Want to buy a secondhand piano? Some inexpensive paintings? How about that famous Viennese food and beer? You could have found everything there, with Conroy as your guide; failing that, his account of those days is just as rewarding and not nearly as fattening."--BOOK JACKET.