THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 37 Overcoming Information Chaos: A Guide to Cultivating Peaceful Communities in the Digital Age Danielle M. Reiff, editor, Upriver Press, 2025, $29.95/paperback (presale), e-book available, 450 pages. Written by 14 media scholars and practitioners, legal experts, democracy specialists, and peacebuilders, Overcoming Information Chaos provides expert guidance about how to defend against false information, mitigate the spread of information disorder, and cultivate community and constructive civic engagement across our traditional divides. Media literacy is a new and essential element of peacebuilding in the digital age. This books helps us to understand how the media ecosystem has changed since the digital transition. In the digital age, peacebuilding starts with learning to use the media responsibly. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us to slow down and be savvier in our interactions with information and each other. Danielle Reiff is a peacebuilder, writer, and editor. As a USAID Foreign Service officer for 20 years, Reiff specialized in supporting democratic transitions and peacebuilding processes in Kampala, Juba, Bogotá, Tbilisi, and Colombo. Retiring in 2024, she founded the nonpartisan Peacebuilders Initiative. FICTION Degrees of Intelligence Miranda Armstadt, independently published, 2025, $18.95/paperback, e-book available, 350 pages. This geopolitical thriller—inspired by Miranda Armstadt’s own father’s experience with the State Department in 1950s Cold War Europe—takes readers behind the scenes in the early years of the CIA, as America fought communism after World War II. Characters include the beautiful daughter of a TV news pioneer, a dashing British viscount, and a teenage Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family to the Nazis. Armstadt uses family letters as well as CIA, State Department, and military memos and documents to weave a vivid tableau of U.S. and British intelligence operations from World War II through the Kennedy administration of the 1960s, along the way showing how a life of secrecy affects everyone it touches. Miranda Armstadt’s father, an FSO from 1952 to 1958, was posted to Belgrade; Salzburg; and Bad Godesberg, Germany. Degrees of Intelligence won a gold medal in the 2025 Historical Fiction category from the Military Writers Society of America. Run Matthew Becker, Aethon Books, 2024, $12.99/paperback, e-book available, 342 pages. When congressional staffer Ben Walsh receives a cryptic text from his wife, Veronica, he doesn’t think much of it. But while waiting to hear from her again, Ben discovers that the text came an hour before a shooting that occurred along her daily running route. She isn’t picking up her phone, and when she doesn’t return home, he knows she is somehow involved. But if she isn’t one of the victims, then what could have happened? When the police name Veronica as their main suspect, Ben questions what he really knows about her. His best chance at saving Veronica is to find her and the truth before the police— or the real killer—do. But what if the truth is more deadly than he could imagine? Run is the first in a three-book series by Matthew Becker, whose wife, Sarah, is a political officer. The Beckers have been posted in Tashkent and Managua. The other two books in the series are Don’t Look Down and Face the Storm. October Surprise Gary Clements, independently published, 2025, $16.95/paperback, e-book available, 220 pages. Rex Avalon, second in charge at the U.S. embassy in the tiny (fictional) European kingdom of Morovia, is invited by its foreign minister to lead the nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. But Rex’s efforts are complicated by the competing plans
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