The Foreign Service Journal, November 2015

54 NOVEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Democratic Transitions: Conversations with World Leaders Edited by Sergio Bitar and Abraham F. Lowenthal, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, $35/paperback; $35/Kindle, 488 pages. This volume records probing conversations with past and present leaders of Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philip- pines, Poland, South Africa and Spain, about the pivotal roles they played in their respective nations’ transitions to democratic governance. There are also chapters devoted to groups of activ- ists in the areas of women’s rights and democracy promotion who have operated in those countries. The interviews stem from an initiative of the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization with 28 member states that promotes sustainable democracy worldwide. Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan praises the insights in Democratic Transitions as “critical to the global dialogue on building open, democratic and sustainable societies.” Sergio Bitar, president of Chile’s Foundation for Democracy, is a political leader and public intellectual. Abraham F. Lowenthal is professor emeritus of the University of Southern California and was the founding director of both the Inter-American Dialogue and the WoodrowWilson Center’s Latin America program. The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security Ann Hagedorn, Simon & Schuster, 2014, $28/hardcover; $17/paperback; $12.99/Kindle; $17.95/audiobook, 321 pages. The number of U.S. contractors operating on foreign battlefields and in U.S. embas- sies all over the world has grown steadily since they were first used during the Balkan stabilization and reconstruction opera- tions of the 1990s. Security contractors have been deployed in African trouble spots, hired to spray coca crops in Colombia and hired in vast numbers to provide security, intelligence, training and other essential services during the wars in Iraq and Afghani- stan. Ann Hagedorn, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal , sounds a much-needed alarm about the ongoing privatization of America’s national security—a trend that paved the way for the Blackwater debacle in Baghdad, among other black eyes for U.S. foreign policy. She shows us how and why this trend began, and why all Americans should be worried about it. Dissolving Tensions: Rapprochement and Resolution in British-American-Canadian Relations in the Treaty of Washington Era, 1865-1914 Phillip E. Myers, Kent State University Press, 2015, $60/hardcover; $49.99/Kindle, 320 pages. At first glance, this book might seem devoted to an extremely esoteric topic. After all, how contentious could relations have been among three English-speaking coun- tries whose troops had last met on a battlefield half a century before the period it covers? In fact, however, it is a fascinating treatment of Reconstruction-era American diplomacy. Paying close attention to the interpersonal and cautiously cooperative interactions of such diplomats as William Seward, Lord John Russell, Hamilton Fish, WilliamGladstone and Ulysses S. Grant, Myers deftly makes the case that the vaunted “special relationship” between London and Washington, often seen as a 20th-century development, actually blossomed following the 1871 Treaty of Washington that settled a slew of issues involving the three nations. Philip E. Myers is a retired research foundation administra- tor, graduate dean and history professor. He is also the author of Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British- American Relations . Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce Sylvia Jukes Morris, Random House, 2015, $35/hardcover; $20/paperback; $13.99/Kindle; $29.95/audiobook, 752 pages. Claire Boothe Luce once told biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris, “I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die.” Price of Fame , the second and concluding volume of this monumental biography of Luce, makes clear that her wish was amply granted. Morris picks up the story with her subject’s 1942 election to the House of Representatives. A decade later, Luce became the first American woman to receive a major ambassadorship, serving as President Dwight Eisenhower’s envoy in Rome from 1953 to 1956