The Foreign Service Journal, November 2015

38 NOVEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL MEMOIRS Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy Christopher R. Hill, Simon & Schuster, 2014, $30/hardcover; $14.99/Kindle; $21.95/audiobook, 448 pages. From his service as a Peace Corps Volun- teer in Cameroon during the 1970s through four tours as a U.S. ambassador, retired FSO Christopher R. Hill faced countless personal and professional challenges all over the world. Hill joined the Foreign Service in 1977 and, over the course of his career, was entrusted with increasingly prominent roles in handling momentous negotiations, from the 1995 Dayton Accords to the Six-Party talks with North Korea a decade later. This memoir gives readers a vivid sense not just of what it’s like to live and work in dangerous hotspots, but of howmuch harder it is to conduct diplomacy when key policymakers in your own government oppose the very concept of negotia- tions. Ambassador Hill describes certain interactions with Vice President Dick Cheney and various U.S. senators as though they were even more frustrating than his attempts to engage Slobodan Milosevic and other foreign adversaries. Reviewing this book in the May FSJ , Steve Honley observed: “Four-time Ambassador Christopher R. Hill’s career certainly gave him plenty of material for a self-congratulatory memoir. Happily, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy not only adroitly avoids that trap, but stands as an exemplar of its genre.” (Find his book talk at www.afsa.org/afsa-videos. ) Christopher R. Hill retired from the Foreign Service in 2010 with the rank of Career Minister. He is dean of the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He also serves on the board of International Relief and Development Inc. and is an adviser with the Albright Stonebridge Group. Cold War Diplomat: Inside U.S. Diplomacy George A. Glass, CWD, 2015, $41/hardcover, 230 pages. In this memoir of his 31-year Foreign Service career, George Glass recounts adventures and conflicts, largely focused on the Cold War and anti-Americanism in West Berlin. “As my career developed, each tour appeared to me as a chapter of a book that gained pages with each day,” he writes. Glass describes his early start as a political officer in Germany in 1981 at the epicenter of the East-West conflict. A marriage and transfer later, he was in Russia dealing with Moscow dissidents. Here he finds himself under arrest by the KGB for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda before eventually being released. By mid-1985, he has left for his first Washington assignment at the Soviet desk before taking on new territory as a “Soviet watcher” at the embassy in Japan. After the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall, he is quickly called back to East Berlin to sort through German reunification. He recalls his first encounters with the new Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and plunging into the Day- ton Peace Accords following the bombing of Bosnian Serbs. Glass reflects on the momentous events he lived and worked through along with commentary on the conflicts between family and career. George A. Glass retired in 2011 and relocated with his wife, Karin, to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he was a researcher at the Atlantic Institute in Paris and a lecturer at the Hamburg Institute for International Politics and Economics. Economics and Diplomacy: A Life in the Foreign Service of the United States Deane R. Hinton, New Academia Publishing/VELLUM Books, 2015, $28/paperback, 458 pages. Part of the ADST-DACOR Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series, Deane Hinton’s memoir describes his remarkable career and presents a firsthand account of the development of U.S. stra- tegic economic policy and the new institutions that became the framework for trade, aid, economic growth and monetary policy. Hinton recounts his youth and military service in Italy in World War II before his segue into the Foreign Service starting with political, commercial and consular positions. He describes some of his most memorable—both positive and negative— moments in subsequent assignments. In Damascus, during the first Palestine War, he survived Israeli bombs and typhoid fever from countless refugees and vainly opposed a CIA-backed coup. In Pakistan, President Zia ul-Haq lied to Hinton about his plans for nuclear weapons, which Zia balanced by lying to the Soviets. This book is a serious record of events and analysis by a skilled policymaker—“an instruction about life in the Foreign Service,