by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

Reginald Dumas, 2015.

Welcome to the 2015 Paper Based Advent Book Blog! Day Fifteen brings us an autobiography with a singularly lived life at its focus — a life which, through the keen and assiduous sharing of its first significant stages, offers its readers platforms to better governance, smarter reforms, and clearer ways to realize our vast civic and individual potential: Reginald Dumas’ The First Thirty Years.

Proving that good diplomacy and policymaking involve far more than an endless series of handshakes and summit convenings, the author takes us through his postings, and the range of his professional duties right up until age 30, where he departs for Ethiopia to establish the Addis Ababa T & T Embassy.

Sharing candidly and with calm reflection on his boyhood beginnings in Chaguanas, Dumas shows the reader not only the ambit of his family hearth, but the socioeconomic structure of the times that cradled and fostered his development. He treats every segment of his retrospective in this manner, so that early QRC musings are also illustrations of a bygone mode of public transit:

“The train was the popular means of transport — in that colonial period they usually ran on time — and the journey each way, with stops, took about one hour. My mother felt that two hours of train travel each day, plus travel from the Port of Spain railway station to the college and back, would adversely affect my academic performance. And nothing, if she could help it, was to be allowed to stand in the way of that.”

Whether ruminating on the thwarted potential of the West Indian Federation ideal, or sharing from the trove of his experiences in the diplomatic service, Dumas defines through experiential example, not lofty posturing, what it means to be of good use — to one’s country, to one’s family, to one’s own personal litmus tests of what integrity and its best practice constitutes.

We recommend it for: prospective or serving diplomats, ambassadors and stateswomen and men everywhere; holders of public and private office who are keen on reading true leadership stories; readers of Ian McDonald and Lloyd Best’s columns.