The Foreign Service Journal, November 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2015 51 the Carter administration, president and CEO of the Council on Foundations, vice president of the Cummins Engine Company and chaplain of Claremont Colleges. The Ambassador’s Wife: A Novel Jennifer Steil, Doubleday, 2015, $26.95/ hardcover; $13.99/Kindle; $26.95/audiobook, 400 pages. Don’t be fooled by this novel’s deceptively colorless title! The Ambassador’s Wife tells a story so spectacular that it is being made into a film starring Anne Hathaway. The title character, Miranda, lives in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Mazrooq with her husband, Finn, and their daughter. Though the family enjoys luxuries that the majority of citizens in the desperately poor and unstable country will never know, they come at a steep price. In the midst of a civil war, Miranda is kidnapped, an act of terror with complex and far-reaching consequences. Jennifer Steil previously published The Woman Who Fell from the Sky , a memoir about her experiences running a newspaper in Yemen. She currently lives in Bolivia, where her husband is the European Union ambassador to La Paz. GROUNDTRUTH: Work, Play and Conflict in the Third World Ben Barber, de.MO Design Limited, 2014, $34/paperback, 240 pages. This handsome collection of photographs and vignettes will give readers unique insights into the daily lives of people around the globe, fromThailand and India to Morocco and Haiti. It is designed to bridge the gap of understanding between the developed and developing worlds through what intelligence officers call “groundtruth”: the real situation on the ground. As former USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios observes, “Ben Barber captures people at work and play, in crisis and recovery, where they tell their own stories in a way which begins to correct the distorted image of life in the developing world.” A longtime contributor to The Foreign Service Journal , Ben Barber has worked for more than 35 years as a reporter and photographer for USA Today , the Baltimore Sun , Newsday , the New York Times , Christian Science Monitor and other publica- tions. He currently writes for The Huffington Post and McClatchy Newspapers. Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security Sarah Chayes, W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, $26.95/hardcover; $16.95/paperback; $12.99/Kindle; $20.95/audiobook, 273 pages. Thieves of State is an authoritative study of the pernicious effects of unabated corrup- tion on global security (see Susan Maitra’s review in the September FSJ ). Sarah Chayes—drawing primarily from her experience in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010 as a radio correspondent, NGO head, small business owner and adviser to the U.S. government—stresses the need to end the U.S. habit of overlooking systemic corruption. Indeed, crooked practices benefitting our bilateral counterparts, as she observed in Kabul, often serve as major drivers of the violent extremism and civil unrest the United States seeks to counteract. In 2010, Sarah Chayes returned to Washington, D.C., to serve as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment. Chayes is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times and is also author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (Penguin Press HC, 2006). Madam Ambassador: Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties, and Democracy in Budapest Eleni Kounalakis, The New Press, 2015, $26.95/hardcover; $12.99/Kindle, 320 pages. Madam Ambassador is an autobiographical glimpse at one California businesswoman’s experience navigating the world of diplomacy as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013. The first Greek- American woman to hold the title, Eleni Kounalakis tells of her grueling vetting process, the challenges inherent in moving one’s family across an ocean, and her ambassadorial triumphs and blunders. From maintaining a delicate balance between fostering strong relations with a key NATO ally in Afghanistan and responding to the country’s rise of nationalism and anti- Semitism, the author’s narrative offers an important example of how a political appointee may work together with her country team to effectively advance U.S. foreign policy. Eleni Kounalakis is the current chair of the California Inter- national Trade and Investment Advisory Council and a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group. She lives with her