There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

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.)