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This unique collection contains reviews of recent and classical publications of interest to the public diplomacy community reviewed by public diplomacy practitioners and scholars. The opinions represented in the CPD Book Reviews are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the position and views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.
CELEBRITY DIPLOMACY
By Andrew F. Cooper
Reviewed by Neal M. Rosendorf
APR 9, 2008
Can Bono, Brangelina and Becks Save the World?
As I read Andrew F. Cooper’s Celebrity Diplomacy, a first-rate meditation on the role of media stars as international relations players, my mind went back to 2000 and a visit by Bono, lead singer of the mega-group U2, to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I heard a commotion outside my office on the third floor of the Littauer Center and peered out into the hallway just in time to see a diminutive figure with longish hair disappear around the corner. Several young women staffers were standing about in a gaga state. “Did you see?” one breathlessly declared. “That was BONO!” I had recently heard that Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who headed the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, had struck up an acquaintanceship with the Irish vocalist; the two shared an interest in the issue of Third World poverty and debt forgiveness as an antidote. Bono was in fact on his way over to the CID office for a meeting with Sachs. (For Bono’s June 2001 Harvard Class Day speech, click here .) At the time, the budding relationship between the buttoned-down academic and the flamboyant rock star seemed to many observers, myself included, little more than an bemusing, ephemeral oddity.
Those of us who at the time minimized Bono’s social-political commitment as a well-meaning pop musician’s passing fancy were of course proven wrong. The cover of Celebrity Diplomacy features a photograph taken years later of Bono walking confidently beside President George Bush,... FULL TEXT
SATCHMO BLOWS UP THE WORLD: JAZZ AMBASSADORS PLAY THE COLD WAR
By Penny Von Eschen
Reviewed by Matthew Thomas
MAR 31, 2008
Following the end of the Cold War and the opening up of communications channels for a free flow of information, the United States government played a less active role in promoting a positive image of American culture abroad, perhaps under the assumption that the international appeal of American popular culture would do the job on its own. One of the unintended consequences of this hands-off approach to public diplomacy has been a rising tide of anti-Americanism, based upon, among other things, the inadequacy of popular culture to provide a full and accurate picture of American society and values. There is now an increasing consensus that active steps need to be taken in order to counter the international perception of American society as uncultured and unsophisticated. Reinvestigating the past successes and failures of American cultural diplomacy as described by Penny Von Eschen in her latest book on the “jazz ambassadors” of the Cold War might provide a good starting point for analysis.
Von Eschen’s thought provoking book entitled Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, explores how and why the U.S. Department of State sent American jazz artists around the world as cultural ambassadors during the Cold War. On one hand, Von Eschen argues, the prominence of black artists, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, as well as integrated bands led by white musicians such as Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck, helped counter international criticism of racism and segregation in American society. On the... FULL TEXT
AL-JAZEERA: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE ARAB NEWS CHANNEL THAT IS CHALLENGING THE WEST
By Hugh Miles
Reviewed by Morand Fachot
OCT 24, 2007
This review first appeared in The Channel
In recent years no broadcast media outlet in the world has attracted as much attention, and controversy as the Qatar-based pan-Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera.
Earlier this year, a survey by a worldwide branding consultancy ranked the network the world’s fifth most influential brand, behind Apple, Google, Ikea and Starbucks.
No mean achievement for a channel launched in 1996 and virtually unknown outside the Arab world before the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Al-Jazeera – How Arab TV news challenged the world, details the origins and gradual expansion of the network which changed the Middle Eastern and global broadcast media landscapes.
The author, Hugh Miles, an Arabic speaker born and partly educated in the Middle East, claims the particular situation of Qatar and the vision of its ruler allowed the creation of an independent channel in the emirate.
From the distinctive nature and shortcomings of the Arabic media scene and the collapse of the BBC Arabic TV channel, to the working practices of the channel and reactions to its broadcasts in the Muslim and Western world, Miles gives a comprehensive account of what made Al-Jazeera such a special phenomenon.
“The BBC Arabic [TV] service was the beginning. For the first time Arabs had the chance to watch Arab journalists doing the news and making programmes to the same standards as Western news channel,” an Al-Jazeera journalist told Miles. The sudden collapse of the BBC Arabic TV channel, a joint venture with the... FULL TEXT
VOICE OF AMERICA – A HISTORY
By Alan L. Heil, Jr.
Reviewed by Morand Fachot
OCT 24, 2007
This review first appeared in International Affairs
The Voice of America (VOA), which broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of programmes in 45 languages to an estimated audience of some 115 million worldwide, is the world’s second largest international broadcaster, yet within the USA itself it is “America’s best-kept secret”.
Alan L. Heil, Jr., who spent 36 years at the Voice, beginning as a newswriter trainee to retire as deputy director after holding several positions including Middle East correspondent and chief of News and Current Affairs, was uniquely placed to write this comprehensive and captivating insight into a “great, sometimes heroic, but fragile and endangered national institution”, stretching from the launch of the service, in February 1942, to its 60th anniversary.
Ever since going on air for the first time, telling its German listeners: “Here speaks a voice from America (...) The news may be good. The news may be bad. We shall tell you the truth”, the Voice has been constantly striving to uphold its editorial independence in the face of persistent political pressures and to secure appropriate funding.
Heil’s detailed account of the Voice’s advances and setbacks, always set in the broader US and international contexts, shows the importance attached by successive US administrations to international broadcasting in their public diplomacy strategy.
Yet, Heil’s record of the often considerable pressures from all official quarters involved in foreign policy – from the White House down to US diplomats abroad – to influence editorial content, shows how US public diplomacy itself... FULL TEXT
THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM: HOW AMERICANS ARE SEDUCED BY WAR
By Andrew Bacevich
Reviewed by Gerald Loftus
SEP 19, 2007
Whatever emerges from America’s predicament in Iraq, at some point we will say “post-Iraq” just as we speak of “post-Vietnam.” Andrew Bacevich, in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War provides a vital guide on how to avoid the kind of post-Vietnam reaction that saw the military hit its drug-ridden nadir in the seventies, only to be elevated to the all-in-one American miracle cure for foreign headaches. He shows how the national narrative of the joys of “power projection” was woven by decades of persuasion in churches, on television, in scholarly journals. Bacevich has a good cinema sense, as seen in his analysis of the role of such Reagan-era films as An Officer and a Gentleman and Top Gun in the glamorization of the military. When first published in late 2005 (now out in paperback), The New American Militarism was a timely critique of what Bacevich sees as a decades-old bipartisan affliction. The passage of time only makes his book more relevant—and, as we shall see, more poignant.
You don’t get more credible commentators on the American fascination with things military than Andrew Bacevich. West Pointer and retired career Army officer, Bacevich teaches at Boston University. He writes extensively on international affairs, and has been highly critical of the Bush Administration’s willful march to war in Iraq. But don’t expect another lefty screed; Bacevich is (perhaps was) a “self-described conservative.” Citizen soldier of the Cold War and Vietnam, Bacevich is concerned with the imperial-sized defense budgets that... FULL TEXT
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