Insightful reading for aspiring diplomats.
A distinguished fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center tells the story of the unlikely road she traveled to become a top diplomat and chief negotiator for the State Department.
Baltimore native Sherman grew up the daughter of a salesman father and homemaker mother who worked for racial equality. As much as their work inspired her, the author never imagined that it would help shape a future that would include a career in international diplomacy. Following her parents’ lead, Sherman became a college student leader and community organizer and then took a master’s degree in social work. She began her career managing a 24-hour crisis hotline in Georgia, where she worked with battered women and saw firsthand how the Jim Crow social order her parents had fought against in the 1960s “stood unchanged.” In the 1980s, Sherman served as then-Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski’s chief of staff and, later, Senate campaign manager. Her activities in partisan politics eventually led to positions as directors of the Democratic National Committee during the 1988 election and, in 1989, EMILY’s List. These successful experiences brought Sherman to the attention of major political figures, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, while making her aware of the fraught relationship women have with “the mantle of power.” At the same time, they also paved the way for policy work on North Korea and, eventually, the contentious treaty negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. As Sherman interweaves personal and professional anecdotes, she also offers candid observations on how she built successful work and negotiation teams, learned to let go of failed dreams—e.g., becoming deputy secretary of state—and persisted in the face of life and career challenges. Sharp and genuine, the book is as much a testament to her accomplishments as it is a call to “find common ground…[and] do good” in an increasingly polarized world.
Insightful reading for aspiring diplomats.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56858-816-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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