Author and diplomat Ben East published Two Pumps for the Body Man as a Bush-Cheney era black comedy set in Saudi Arabia. Two Pumps does for American diplomacy and the War on Terror what Catch-22 did for military logic during the Second World War: The enemy can’t kill us if our institutions kill us first. His second novel, Patchworks, examines American gun culture in a similar light. Diplomatic assignments have taken the Connecticut native to India, Washington, Mexico, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia. He taught literature and composition at the American School of Asuncion in Paraguay; at Brooklyn College Academy in New York; and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi.