The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

32 NOVEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger Stephen H. Grant, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, $29.95/ hardcover, $16.49/Kindle, 264 pages. In Collecting Shakespeare , Stephen H. Grant recounts the American suc- cess story of Henry and Emily Folger of Brooklyn. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers began buying, cataloging and storing all man- ner of items about the Bard of Avon and his era. Emily earned a master’s degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple financed their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller. While several universities offered to house the couple’s col- lection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard’s birthday, April 23, 1932. On Capitol Hill, it now houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and is also a vibrant cultural center for plays, concerts, lectures and poetry readings. The library provided Stephen H. Grant with unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault. He also drew on interviews with surviving Folger relatives, and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain. Stephen H. Grant, a senior fellow at the Association for Diplo- matic Studies and Training, served for 25 years with USAID. His Foreign Service postings included the Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Indonesia, Egypt and Guinea. He is the author of Peter Strick- land: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal (New Academia, 2006), as well as three books that use old picture postcards to recount social history. Frances Elizabeth Willis Nicholas J. Willis, self-published, 2014, $24.95/paperback, $9.95/Kindle, 461 pages. Born at the turn of the century, Frances Eliz- abethWillis (1899-1983) lived an extraordi- nary life. She was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in political science fromStanford University (in 1923) and the first woman to make a career in the U.S. Foreign Service (from1927 to 1964). Willis started off as a “Foreign Service Officer–Unclassified” and worked her way up the Foreign Service ladder. In 1953, she was appointed U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, the first female career officer to become an ambassador, and subsequently served as chief of mission in Norway and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1955, she was given the title “Career Minister” and in 1962 attained the highest rank in the Foreign Service, “Career Ambassador.” A genuine trailblazer, Ms. Willis’ accomplishments are all the more impressive in light of the severe gender bias then prevalent in both the State Department and Foreign Service. How she over- came those barriers is the subject of this engaging biography. Nicholas J. Willis is the nephew of Frances Elizabeth Willis and knew her well. He graduated from Stanford University on a U.S. Navy scholarship in 1956 and, after five years on active duty, spent the rest of his career on military radars and their countermea- sures. He wrote this book following his retirement to Carmel, Calif. American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama John H. Miller, Lexington Press, 2014, $80/hardback, $68.40/Kindle, 184 pages. American Political and Cultural Perspec- tives on Japan: From Perry to Obama is a comprehensive survey of how Americans have viewed Japan over the past 160 years. It encompasses the diplomatic, political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of the relationship, with an emphasis on changing American images, myths and stereotypes of Japan and the Japanese. John H. Miller begins his account with the American “open- ing” of Japan in the 1850s and 1860s. Subsequent chapters explore American attitudes toward Japan during the Gilded Age, the early 1900s, the 1920s, the 1930s and the Pacific War. The second part of the book, organized around the theme of the postwar Japanese-American partnership, covers the Occupation, the 1960s, the troubled 1970s and 1980s, and the post–Cold War decades down to the Obama presidency. Miller concludes with some predictions about how Americans are likely to view Japan in the future. John H. Miller, a retired Foreign Service officer, served in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Canada. Following his retire- ment from the Service, he taught at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, and was the Asia area studies chair at the Foreign Service Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Japanese his- tory from Princeton University, and is the author of Modern East Asia: An Introductory History (M.E. Sharpe, 2007).