Ocean State Libraries

Mother, wife, scholar, diplomat, and fierce champion of American interests and values, Susan Rice connects the personal and the professional. Taught early, with tough love, how to compete and excel as an African American woman in settings where people of color are few, Susan now shares the wisdom she learned along the way. Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, DC, she also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced...

"As Alexander Hamilton's star has risen, Thomas Jefferson's has fallen, largely owing to their divergent views on race. Once seen as the most influential American champion of liberty and democracy, Jefferson is now remembered largely for his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, and for electing not to free her or most of the other people he owned. In this magisterial biography, the eminent scholar John B. Boles does not ignore the aspects of...

"This page-turning narrative follows the twists and turns of the life of hostage-turned-diplomat James Leander Cathcart upon the international stage of diplomacy, trade, and maritime statecraft at a time when America's place in the world was hanging in the balance"--

Danger Zones is the autobiography of John Gunther Dean, a leading American diplomat of the twentieth century. His early life and eventful international career provide provocative reflections on significant events and leaders, American and foreign, and insights and advice on the practice of proactive diplomacy. Over the course of his action-packed career, Dean found himself embroiled in controversy in hot spots in Asia and the Middle East. During several...

"SERIOUSLY NOT ALL RIGHT : Five Wars in Ten Years is a memoir by Ron Capps, who served both in military intelligence and in the foreign service and as an observer over the span of ten years in wars raging in three continents and over a span of a decade, from Kosovo to Darfur. He received the Bronze Star Medal for his service in Afghanistan, and the William Rivkin Award for his work in Darfur. The victim of PTSD as the result of the human rights abuses...

"During the past ten years, few issues have mattered more to America's vital interests or to the shape of the twenty-first century than Russia's fate. To cheer the fall of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia - with its thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic tensions - between the Scylla of a communist restoration...