The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

34 NOVEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL account of the workings and effectiveness of such long-term programs. Daniel Whitman is assistant professor of foreign policy at American University’s Washington Semester Program. During a 24-year Foreign Service career, he served in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Haiti, Cameroon and Guinea, as well as in Wash- ington, D.C. FSO Kari Jaksa is currently posted in Shanghai. A Concise History of Economists’ Assumptions about Markets: From Adam Smith to Joseph Schumpeter Robert E. Mitchell, Praeger, 2014, $35.15, hardcover, 180 pages. Here is a highly readable account of the evolution of economic thinking, as the subtitle states, fromAdam Smith to Joseph Schumpeter. Author Robert Mitchell’s focus is on the assumptions that economists make about the nature of markets and economies and their behavior through different eras as they attempt to identify the drivers of economic change. The book assesses the legacies of major economists, includ- ing Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Alfred Mar- shall, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter. Each chapter covers the major economic, political and social challenges of the day to establish a realistic context for economists’ efforts to explain and predict contempo- rary economic developments. It also documents the differences between, as well as interac- tion among, the various schools of thought and models, and discusses the implications of this history for economics and the policy sciences in the decades ahead. The book is based on a course, “Changing Mental Models of Markets and Economies,” the author gave for fellow non-econo- mists at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement in 2013. Robert Mitchell retired in 1995 from the USAID Foreign Service following long-term postings in Egypt, Yemen and Guinea-Bissau. Prior to his diplomatic career, Mitchell directed two survey research centers and two long-term task forces for the Florida governor and state legislature, and served as the U.S. member on a United Nations special committee on planning for urban areas. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era Eugene Schmiel, Ohio University Press, 2014, $26.95, paperback, 352 pages. A special selection of the History Book Club, Citizen-General chronicles the life of Jacob Dolson Cox, a former divinity stu- dent with no formal military training who emerged as one of the best commanders in the Union army. During his school days at Oberlin College, no one could have predicted that. Yet the reserved and bookish Cox helped secure West Virginia for the Union; jointly commanded the left wing of the Union army at the critical Battle of Antietam; broke the Confeder- ate supply line, thereby helping to precipitate the fall of Atlanta; and held the defensive line at the Battle of Franklin, a Union victory that effectively ended the Confederate threat in the West. In fact, in each of his vocations and avocations—general, governor, Cabinet secretary, university president, law school dean, railroad president, historian and scientist—the intellectual Ohioan was recognized as a leader. Cox’s greatest fame, however, came as the foremost participant-historian of the Civil War. His accounts of the conflict are to this day cited by serious scholars and are the basis for interpreting many aspects of the war. FSO Eugene Schmiel was an assistant professor of history at St. Francis University in Pennsylvania and has taught at Mary- mount, Shenandoah and Penn State universities. He retired from the Foreign Service in 2002, after service as chargé d’affaires in Djibouti, Bissau and Reykjavík, among many other assignments, and has since worked in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames Kai Bird, Crown Publishers, 2014, $26, hardcover, 430 pages. In this biography of CIA agent and Middle East hand Robert Ames, Kai Bird paints a vivid picture not only of the life and work of Ames, but of Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and the wider Middle East during the tumultuous years of the 1960s through the 1980s, including the early years of the Palestinian struggle for independence. Ames, the son of a Philadelphia-area steel worker, played basketball at LaSalle University, served in the Army Signal Corps in what is now Eritrea, took and failed the Foreign Service exam, and then joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he spe-