Exciting!! My second book of fiction, A TRIP BY CANOE, will be published in July 2026 by Koehler Books.
CANOE follows my March 2025 historical action-adventure/political thriller novel, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM.
Set during the tumultuous years between 1968 and 1981, A TRIP BY CANOE opens windows for readers on a vast expanse of little-explored terrain from Kenya to Texas, from Chicago to the Congo, from Detroit to the Alps, from India to to Paris.
Graphic and gritty, at times heavy and...
WHY I WROTE STREAM
I went to Africa right after college in the early 1970s. I traveled. I worked in construction. I hung out. When I got back home five years later mother asked me again and again, “What did you actually do in Africa?” She was very persistent. She wanted to know: Where had I gone? Whom did I meet? Who were my friends? Was I ever in danger? What had I seen? Was I ever afraid? What was in my mind? What was I thinking? I wrote DRINKING FROM THE STREAM to answer those questions.
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“Cinematic, immersive, and absolutely timely. It has the bones of a cult classic."
"Drinking from the Stream isn’t just a debut novel, it’s a high-voltage cocktail of political thriller, action-adventure, and history— Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, Africa on the cusp of transformation… a fugitive farm boy, a tortured Oxford dropout, and a dangerous plunge into dictatorship and chaos. That’s not 'just a book'… that’s a cinematic gut-punch."
"A political thriller woven with history, action,...
In June 1972 when I was twenty-two years old I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then Portuguese but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. In fact, I recently had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who recently had seen combat with guerrillas. What caught my eye in the Herald Trib was an article about ethnic killings in...
Foreword
Drinking from the Streamis a tale of modern Africa. The story takes place in 1971, 1972 and 1973, a time of violent upheaval when the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution marked a generation. The action spans ten countries, from Louisiana and the United States to Tanzania.
Mass killing in Uganda was already in full swing in 1972 when the Stream characters arrive, a year after General Idi Amin overthrew President Milton Obote. Yet Amin could not rule Uganda without the guns...
Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you.
First, a little about me. Please check my website, richardsacks.com, for imformation about the book and pictures of Africa.
I joined the State Department Foreign Service in 1989. I was posted with my family to six countries in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. And I held a bunch of increasingly important jobs in Washington. I have two graduate degrees — one from Johns Hopkins University in...
