The Foreign Service Journal, January 2013

40 JANUARY 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Lijek’s understated approach enhanced my appreciation for the book’s final sec- tion, in which he moves on with his life and career. As with many self-published books, the writing has rough edges, particu- larly in terms of punctuation. And while I certainly understand the impulse to blame Jimmy Carter and other figures for their roles in the crisis, I didn’t find Lijek’s reasoning to be very persuasive. All that said, if you only have time for one of those two books, read The House- guests . But if you are interested in spycraft or don’t plan to see “Argo,” it is also worth reading Mendez’s account. Steven Alan Honley is the editor of The Foreign Service Journal. Diplomacy Dissected At Home with the Diplomats: Inside a European Foreign Ministry Iver B. Neumann, Cornell University Press, 2012, $24.95, paperback, 216 pages. Reviewed by John M. Grondelski Have you ever thought of diplomats as a kind of aboriginal tribe? Iver B. Neumann has. A political scientist and anthropologist, he spent almost four years working in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to produce this fasci- nating study examining diplomats from the perspective of an ethnographer. As far as I know, nobody has ever studied members of our profession in quite that way. But viewing Foreign Service processes like information gathering (writ- ing), hierarchy roles (promotion and chain-of-com- mand behavior), and social status (demographics) through such a lens can be very illuminating. Take what Neumann calls “knowl- edge production.” We all know that diplomats exist to gather knowledge and analyze it. But what makes their reporting different from that of, say, CNN? Neumann claims it is a specific kind of knowledge, with a short shelf-life