98 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL these new probationary employees in some of its mass firings. Who Is Government? can usefully be read in tandem with Lewis’ book The Fifth Risk. In that 2018 work, Lewis vividly recounts the first Trump administration’s willful lack of knowledge about what the federal bureaucracy does. The Fifth Risk was way ahead of the curve in sounding the alarm about the dangers inherent in the hollowing out of governmental functions. As an aside, another valuable resource is the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit body that runs a website (https://ourpublicservice.org) brimming with information on the federal workforce. It also organizes the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, aka the Sammies, which are given out each year in honor of excellence in public service. Americans owe Michael Lewis and his fellow writers an immense debt of gratitude. At this time of maximum threat, they advocated for federal workers and the mission-critical services they provide. The book will by no means prove the sole antidote to DOGE’s senseless onslaught, but it is effective in spelling out what is at stake for the country. The epigraph for Who Is Government? is from the State of the Union address given by President John F. Kennedy to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on January 30, 1961. Worth citing in full, it reads: “Let the public service be a proud and lively career. And let every man and woman who works in any area of our national government, in any branch, at any level, be able to say with pride and with honor in future years: ‘I served the United States Government in that hour of our nation’s need.’” The words still resonate. Joseph L. Novak is a writer based in Washington, D.C. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London and a retiree member of the American Foreign Service Association. A former lawyer, he was a Foreign Service officer for 30 years. An Origin Story Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World David Van Reybrouck, W.W. Norton, 2024, $32.50/hardcover, e-book available, 656 pages. Reviewed by Walter North In Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck characterizes Indonesia’s successful struggle for independence after World War II as an “unprecedented event of global significance.” In a sense that is accurate. The creation of the modern Indonesian state was a major historic achievement. An accessible English account of the tale should be good news. Indonesia is big, important, and fascinating but insufficiently understood outside its borders. Much of this deeply researched work focuses effectively on the heart of the story—the struggle of Indonesian patriots. Particularly noteworthy is its granular coverage of Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation of the archipelago during World War II, some of the internal tensions on the Indonesian side, and the extended fighting and negotiations after the war that ultimately resulted in a complete victory for the Indonesians. But that gripping narrative thread is sometimes blurred in this work by wider claims about what the event meant for the broader decolonialization effort (Indonesia’s story was very site-specific and not a template for other liberation struggles). A moralizing tendency and some clunky writing (translation and editing issues perhaps) can be distracting. There is a liberal use of fascinating oral histories from now aged participants in the events from Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, and the Netherlands. Those personal stories highlight the humanitarian costs of the process, serious human rights abuses by all sides in the conflict, inequitable and exploitative aspects of both Dutch and Japanese colonialism, and how ill-prepared and slow outside participants (predominantly the United States and Great Britain) were to recognize the legitimacy of the aspirations of the Indonesians. Unfortunately, their scale and scope stretch the narrative tautness of this work. Moreover, extended treatment and broad claims about the importance and impact of the 1955 Bandung Conference, hosted by the Indonesians and attended by a variety of leading anticolonialists and international freedom fighters, distracts from the excellent treatment of the absorbing story of Indonesia’s struggle for independence. The author claims that Bandung was a catalytic element in events as disparate as the Suez Crisis and the American civil rights movement. While the Bandung spirit of south-south solidarity was certainly an element of inspiration
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