The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

40 NOVEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL “Negroponte emphasizes that he was ‘tough, determined and competitive,’ and highlights his laser-like focus on pivotal issues.” Diana Villiers Negroponte, a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has lectured on international politics at several universities. She is also the author of Seeking Peace in El Salvador: The Struggle to Reconstruct a Nation at the End of the Cold War (2012). She dedicates this book to her husband, retired Ambassador John D. Negroponte—this year’s recipient of AFSA’s Lifetime Contributions to Diplomacy Award—with whom she ably partnered at postings around the world for many years. The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter Kai Bird, Crown, 2021, $38/hardcover, e-book available, 784 pages. For decades after his defeat in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency was often unfairly labeled a failure. This was in part because he was not just an outsider in Washington but, as Kai Bird’s biography rightly labels him, an outlier . Not only was Carter the first president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, but his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. Carter was also an outlier for his unshakable belief in doing the right thing, an approach that ultimately cost him reelection but also produced diplomatic triumphs such as the Panama Canal Treaty and the Camp David Accords. Bird traces the arc of his administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, and shows us how he tackled issues still hotly debated today—from national health care and growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration, and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has arguably been deeply misunderstood. The son of the late FSO Eugene Bird, Kai Bird is an award- winning historian and journalist. In addition to serving as executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he is an acclaimed author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin, 2005). Nisei Resistance and Resilience: A Japanese-American Life V.L. Purvis-Smith, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2021, $39/paperback, 398 pages. Although born almost two decades apart, Ginny Purvis-Smith, the author of this biography, and Allen Maruyama, its subject, are both members of the “Silent Generation.” They also both grew up on the high plains of south- eastern Colorado, are descendants of immigrants, attended the same elementary school in their early years, were members of the same small-town church, attended the same seminary and were ordained as ministers in the Presbyterian Church. Not until her friendship with Maruyama began in 2007, though, did Purvis-Smith begin to understand how differently the two occupied the shared layers of their respective histories. Even though the Maruyamas escaped the mass relocation and internment so many of their fellow Japanese Americans endured during World War II, they still suffered abuse and discrimination. The author emphasizes that this book is Allen’s story, primarily as he told it in more than 30 interviews she recorded with him and Rose, his wife of 63 years, and then transcribed. V.L. Purvis-Smith (Ginny) is the spouse of Terry Purvis-Smith, who entered the Foreign Service in 1999 and retired in 2006. She directed the American English Language program in Dakar while they were posted in Senegal (1999-2001), worked in crisis management support at Main State (2001-2003), and then taught at the University of the Bahamas when they were posted to Nassau (2003-2006). She is also the author of Greenwood Riven (2016), a historical novel based on the life of Allen Maruyama. Spies, Bombs, and Beyond: A Walking History of Washington DC’s Tenleytown Mark Fitzpatrick, independently published, 2020, $19/paperback, e-book available, 146 pages. Those who know retired Foreign Service Officer Mark Fitzpatrick for his expertise on nuclear diplomacy may be surprised by the subject matter of his latest book: his neighborhood. When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, he began setting out each day on a different walk from his home in