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OUTPOST

Name: OUTPOST
Author: Christopher Hill
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8591-6

LIFE ON THE FRONT LINES OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY: A MEMOIR

by Christopher Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014

A must for anyone contemplating a Foreign Service career and for general readers looking for insight into diplomacy...

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
BEYOND THE GOD PARTICLE
by Leon Lederman ; Christopher Hill

- BOOK REVIEW
LIBERTY AGAINST THE LAW
by Christopher Hill

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ENGLISH BIBLE AND THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REVOLUTION
by Christopher Hill

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.