A must for anyone contemplating a Foreign Service career and for general readers looking for insight into diplomacy...
The dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver reflects on his more than 30 years in America’s Foreign Service.
From his days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon—he still insists it was his favorite job—to his final post as America’s ambassador to Iraq, Hill’s career covers a lot of territory, both geographically and in terms of our diplomatic history. He entered the State Department during the Cold War 1970s and became the nation’s first ambassador to Macedonia. Hill’s service included two more ambassadorships—Poland and South Korea—and an appointment as assistant secretary for East Asia. The best of his smoothly recounted stories, and the largest part of this narrative, center on three excruciatingly difficult assignments. First, he chronicles his memories of helping the irrepressible Richard Holbrooke end the war in Bosnia, negotiations that ended in the Dayton Peace Accords. Hill’s affection for and exasperation with “the Holbrooke force field” emerge from numerous episodes that add up to a memorable portrait of an unusual and remarkably effective diplomat at work. Second, as an add-on to his East Asia portfolio, Hill helmed the Six Party Talks with North Korea aimed at dismantling that country’s nuclear weapons program. The negotiations proved unsuccessful, but Hill’s retelling demonstrates the difficulties and the value of diplomacy even when the primary objective remains unrealized. Third, the author discusses his final, frustrating year-plus in Iraq when, seven years into the war, the State Department was still struggling to establish a meaningful role. A parade of famous names—presidents, secretaries of state, vice presidents, foreign heads of state, senators, generals—marches through these pages, and readers will delight at some of the shots fired and bouquets thrown at powerful personages who’ve been responsible for our foreign policy for the past 40 years.
A must for anyone contemplating a Foreign Service career and for general readers looking for insight into diplomacy conducted at the highest levels.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8591-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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