Slow Boat to Pakistan: The Personal Diaries and Letters of Pegge Parker, 1951-1952

Pegge Parker lived two lives. Her first life as a journalist in D.C., and Alaska took her by Slow Boat to China (the first book in the series) where her gutsy adventures landed her in China on her writing skills alone. Slow Boat to Pakistan picks up after her husband Doug Mackiernan, a CIA operative, was killed on the Tibetan border escaping from China. Now a mother and a widow, and needing to make a living, Pegge left their baby twins with Doug's parents in Boston and embarked on another slow boat, this time through the Suez Canal to Pakistan where she began a new career as Vice Consul and Press Officer at the American Consulate in Lahore. Pegge continued her adventurous life by reporting for the State Department during her travels to the Northwest Territories and the Khyber Pass bordering Afghanistan, to Katmandu in Nepal and the Himalayas and to exotic destinations in India. Her insightful peeks inside the political world and the diplomatic life were captured in her meticulous diary notes and letters to her parents chronicled here. Pegge made plans to come back to the U.S. and write for the Ladies' Home Journal and make a home for her three-year-old twins. Enter John Hlavacek, a United Press reporter in India, who, after a chance meeting and tumultuous courtship, married Pegge in Bombay and whisked her off to Rome for a month-long honeymoon.