A breezy, informative profile on foreign service that serves as an inviting primer for prospective diplomats and their...
A career diplomat uses embassy cables to describe the complex lives of foreign service officers.
When WikiLeaks published 251,287 cables in 2010, the massive leak of confidential information polarized the American public. But Thompson-Jones (Director, Global Studies and International Relations/Northeastern Univ.) is an academic and veteran diplomat, and her viewpoint is positive: the exposed cables describe daily life in U.S. embassies around the world. The author argues that the American people know very little about their ambassadors and fail to appreciate their delicate work. “When onetime presidential candidate Ross Perot famously said that diplomats could be replaced by fax machines,” she writes, “he ignored the real art in delivering a message that offers an opportunity for a conversation. Diplomats listen for a reaction. In many cultures a diplomat has to know when yes means no, or maybe, or we’ll see.” Thompson-Jones dedicates much of her book to major themes, such as “travel” and “frenemies,” and she boils down entire countries to one quality or another: Bulgaria, to Thompson-Jones, represents “corruption,” and she describes the nation through its web of organized crime. Most of her quotes derive from cables, which are heavy with perspective and nuance. The most dramatic chapter focuses on Iraq, an assignment that most diplomats resented, but the book is dense with provocative anecdotes from around the globe—e.g., one diplomat in China was shocked to find a bevy of abused tigers, alarming Washington, D.C., with his lurid descriptions. Not surprisingly, Thompson-Jones writes about sticky situations in a diplomatic way. “The transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama brought with it a long-needed lift in America’s world standing,” she writes carefully. The author dedicates a final chapter to Hillary Clinton, thoughtfully assessing her tenure as secretary of state. Amid the current heated election cycle, Thompson-Jones provides some sharp insights into Clinton’s performance.
A breezy, informative profile on foreign service that serves as an inviting primer for prospective diplomats and their admirers.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24658-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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