Sunday, February 13, 2022

There Is Nothing For You Here

 The magical elves that Google keep in cages studying my history and recommending YouTube videos came up with Intelligence Squared's Standoff in Ukraine: How we reached crisis with Fiona Hill yesterday.

Interesting person Fiona Hill (here's her Wikipedia page). I am somewhat surprised that I had never even heard of her before. Here's part of the blurb from her latest book on Amazon.

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, and her unique perspectives as a 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 US 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.

She reads it on Audible. That may well be where my next credit is spent when it turns up a week from today.

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