| Opportunity -- Economic aspects -- United States -- 21st century. |
| Opportunity -- Social aspects -- United States -- 21st century. |
| Political culture -- United States -- 21st century. |
| United States -- Economic conditions -- 21st century. |
| United States -- Social conditions -- 21st century. |
| Autobiographies. |
| Hill, Fiona, 1965- |
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Library | Collection | Material Type | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Cobourg Branch | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction Book | 339.2 Hil | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
"This book has a miraculous quality.... As a memoir this is hard to put down; if you are seeking a better American future you should pick it up."--Timothy Snyder, New York Times best-selling author of On Tyranny
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ^ A celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia--and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, as well as her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places.
Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: "There is nothing for you here, pet," he said.
The coal-miner's daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink--and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia's fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.
"Of every book written by anybody associated with the Trump administration, in any way, [this] is absolutely the one to read."--Rachel Maddow
A New York Times Bestseller ^ A Washington Post Bestseller ^ A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year ^ A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Author Notes
FIONA HILL is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin , she lives in the Washington, D.C. area.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former National Security Council official Hill (Mr. Putin) blends memoir and policy analysis in this lucid account. She traces her journey from northern England, where her father and grandfather were coal miners, to a college exchange program in Moscow, where she worked as a translator for NBC News during the 1988 summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, and a Harvard PhD. She also discusses serving in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations as an adviser on Russian affairs, and her decision to testify against President Trump over his pressure campaign on Ukraine. But the heart of the book is Hill's argument that declining opportunity in the U.S. mirrors the socioeconomic situations in England and Russia, and is at the heart of political turmoil in all three countries. She examines personal mobility and wage inequality through the lenses of place, class, race, and gender, and makes a forceful argument for investing in education to lower the barriers to opportunity. She also refutes Trump's "personalized populist politics" and warns that the U.S. will experience more "ruinous populist and sectarian politics" until people "see concrete, personally measurable examples of positive change within their own immediate physical communities." Readers will come for the insider details about Trump, but stay for the keen analysis. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
When Donald Trump heard Fiona Hill was publishing a memoir, he characteristically tried to land a pre-emptive blow, dismissing his former Russia adviser as "a deep state stiff with a nice accent". As Trumpian insults go, it was enough of a backhanded compliment for one of Hill's friends to have it printed on a T-shirt as a gift. A lot has happened since Donald Trump's impeachment hearings in late 2019 in which Hill gave evidence, not least a frontal assault on US democracy by his supporters. But people still remember her accent. There was something so calm and matter-of-fact in Hill's flat County Durham vowels that was the antithesis of Trump's bullying bravado. Her voice, that of a coalminer's daughter from northern England describing the turmoil and corruption inside the White House, instantly raised the question: "How did she get there?" Hill's book, There Is Nothing for You Here, is a long, thoughtful answer to that question. It takes in the story of industrial and political rot in three nations: the UK, the country of her birth; the US, the country of her choosing; and Russia, the object of her lifelong vocation. The powerful currents driving the modern history of those three states carried her on her remarkable life's journey. The state-assisted euthanasia of the British coal industry in the early 80s drove her from her home town of Bishop Auckland, where her family had been miners for generations. The book's title was a warning from her father, Alf, to get out while she could. He had first gone down the pit at the age of 14, but by the time Fiona was growing up, the only job he could find was as a hospital porter, the bottom of the heap with no way up. The Hill family were the archetypal victims of the post-industrial decline she would go on to study. "We were living data points," she realised. Following her dad's advice she worked her way out through study. She went to St Andrews University and then to the Soviet Union in time to observe its last climactic years. The expertise she gained took her to the US and Harvard as a Russia scholar with a growing reputation that ultimately brought her to the White House. Trump took his pre-publication shot at Hill because he naturally assumed her book, like a shelf-full of others by former staffers, would be all about him. But for Hill, the ex-president is just the symptom of a deeper, chronic dysfunction.There is plenty here about the craziness of life in the Trump administration and Hill has a knack for capturing the absurdities of the court of King Donald. She describes the scramble to get his attention (he had no idea who she was and on one occasion mistook her for a secretary), the relentless bullying (she was called the "Russia bitch" by her "colleagues"), and the universal fear the president would turn against them. While other Trump-era memoirs have focused almost solely on the carnival, Hill's scope pans out to the wounded country that put him in office, and then wider still, across the Atlantic to Britain and then across Europe to Russia. What they all had in common is rapid, catastrophic deindustrialisation. In Russia, that came about through the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. In the US and the UK, it was inflicted by the political leadership and their economist gurus. "Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off," Hill notes. Those buried alive, in that memorable metaphor, lost their sense of community and self. Being a miner was more than a job to Alf Hill and his contemporaries, it was an identity. That is where political populism comes in, offering to fill the hole with comforting illusions. Hill points out that 61% of voters in Bishop Auckland chose Brexit even though it meant cutting off EU structural funds vital to its attempts at regeneration. It is also why American rust belt voters convinced themselves that Trump understood them. It is an analysis that has been laid out by others before, but what makes it particularly compelling here is that it is intertwined with a unique life story of a working-class English woman who ended up sitting across from, and cooly observing, the preening "strongmen" of our age. Where Hill is most provocative is in her warnings that having centuries of democratic experience will not necessarily protect us from Russia's fate. "Russia is America's Ghost of Christmas Future", she argues, a harbinger of things to come if we can't adjust and heal our political polarisation." What if the next Trump is "less personally insecure and more capable"? And what if the next insurrectionary mob that invades the US Capitol is better prepared, Hill asks in this fascinating book. The answer? "They might just manage to hold it."
Kirkus Review
A renowned expert on modern Russia recounts her struggles overcoming economic and social barriers growing up in northern England and draws attention to the looming issues of inequality she sees in the U.S. Hill had been a foreign affairs adviser for many years before serving as an official for the U.S. National Security Council under Donald Trump, yet it was through her engagingly blunt witness testimony during Trump's first impeachment trial that she gained national attention. Her personal story, in particular, attracted the public's interest and curiosity. In this ambitious, immensely compelling memoir, Hill interweaves her interesting life story with events and issues she has continued to observe during her career. "My life experiences, long before I ended up in the Trump White House, had opened my eyes to the dangerous consequences of economic disruption and social dislocation," she writes. "In the United Kingdom, my family experienced the overwhelming sense of economic precariousness and political disenfranchisement that also beset millions of people in the U.S. over the generations stretching from the 1960s to 2020." The author persuasively argues that America may be heading in a similar direction to Russia unless we address the crucial challenges facing much of the country, specifically regarding education, health care, and job opportunities. Drawing insightful parallels between Trump and Putin, she unpacks how the threat of populism can quickly undermine democracy: "If we fail to fix our ailing society by addressing them and providing opportunity for all, another American president, just like Vladimir Putin, might decide to stay in power indefinitely." Currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Hill also recounts her personal challenges as a woman working in the highest levels of government, struggles that all women readers will recognize, regardless of their workplace. A shrewd, absorbing memoir that casts a sharp eye on America's future while offering feasible solutions for change. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Anyone who saw even a snip of Hill's riveting testimony during Donald Trump's first impeachment might assume that the poised, erudite professional was the product of British upper-class privilege. Not so, according to Hill. The accent that captivated U.S. audiences would have been like fingernails on a chalkboard to Brits. The daughter of a coal miner from an impoverished district in northern England, Hill succeeded by sheer dint of impressive academic skills, surprising networking opportunities, and her own keen ambition, fueled by her father's admonition to seek fortune elsewhere. In a memoir that spans her hardscrabble childhood and the exalted world of national security think tanks, Hill reveals how she capitalized on her insider-outside status to become a PhD-holding intelligence officer and foreign policy expert focused on the three countries most important to her, the U.S., the UK, and Russia. She also pinpoints how they each may be on trajectories that could unfurl in alarming and nation-destroying ways. Hill takes an almost anthropological view of her time in the Trump White House, observing the behavior and attitudes of colleagues as if they were subjects in a social experiment. The result is a sobering analysis of the toxic environment Trump and his aides created and how it continues to threaten democracy's very existence.
Library Journal Review
This book by foreign policy expert Hill, combining memoir and political science, accounts for her 30-year career as a specialist in U.S.-Russia relations, provides insights on political divisions in the United States, and argues that declining economic opportunity can spark authoritarianism. Hill made headlines in 2019 when she testified before Congress during the first Trump impeachment hearing, as a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration. Here she relates the personal challenges she overcame to reach that position. Hill grew up in the economically distressed North East region of England, after the collapse of coal mining industries. She left the region to study internationally, including a year spent in the Soviet Union as its empire was collapsing. In 1989, Hill received a scholarship to the Harvard Kennedy School where she studied economic inequality in the U.S., UK, and Russia. With her knowledge of post-Soviet Russia, Hill makes a convincing case that populism can slide into authoritarianism if citizens and leadership are not vigilant and demonstrates similar political outcomes throughout the world. VERDICT Readers interested in Hill's life and in international relations will be well informed by this book; her reporting of behind-the-scenes activity in the Trump White House will also fascinate.--Jill Ortner, SUNY Buffalo Libs.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: The "Improbable" | p. 1 |
| Introduction: From the Coal House to the White House | p. 7 |
| Part 1 The Coal House | |
| 1 "Call the United Nations" | p. 17 |
| 2 Grasping at the Future | p. 36 |
| 3 Out of Your League | p. 45 |
| 4 Common Northerner | p. 69 |
| Part 2 A Divided House | |
| 5 The Land of Opportunity | p. 93 |
| 6 Shock Therapy | p. 117 |
| 7 Women's Work | p. 135 |
| 8 Unlucky Generations | p. 148 |
| Part 3 The White House | |
| 9 Me the People | p. 169 |
| 10 "Russia Bitch" | p. 191 |
| 11 The Price of Populism | p. 218 |
| 12 Off with Their Heads | p. 239 |
| 13 The Horrible Year | p. 264 |
| Part 4 Our House | |
| 14 The Great Reckoning | p. 285 |
| 15 No More Forgotten People | p. 305 |
| 16 No More Forgotten Places | p. 329 |
| Conclusion | p. 352 |
| Afterword: Creating Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century | p. 357 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 362 |
| Notes | p. 371 |
| Index | p. 401 |