Please join us for this special Book Talk presentation hosted by the United Nations Association of New York
Fiona Hill
Author of There is Nothing For You Here
in conversation with
Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich
George F. Kennan Senior Fellow, Russian and Eurasian Studies
Council on Foreign Relations
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Thursday | 17 February 2022 | 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST
In There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, 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, Fiona Hill shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.
In this Book Talk, Fiona Hill will be joined in conversation with Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich, the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Note: readers can purchase the book here
From reviews of There Is Nothing for You Here
“Valuable and riveting . . . Hill’s personal, professional and political lives form a coherent whole so that each part illuminates the other . . . a memoir that will give pleasure to readers today — and will be an important document for historians of the future.”
— Financial Times
"In this captivating chronicle of her improbable life, Fiona Hill takes us from a Northern England of idled coal mines and deindustrialization to Trump’s Oval Office, demonstrating how individual biography can illuminate far broader issues of world affairs. Her book represents a stern and essential warning about the global threats to democracy and their root causes in a worldwide crisis of opportunity."
— Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita and Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University
“A story told with self-deprecating humor and kindness . . . Unlike other tell-all authors from the Trump administration, [Hill] isn’t obsessed with the scandalous. Much like her measured but riveting testimony in Trump’s first impeachment, the book offers a more sober, and thus perhaps more alarming, portrait of the 45th president. If Hill’s tone is restrained, it is damning by a thousand cuts. It lays out how a career devoted to understanding and managing the Russian threat crashed into her revelation that the greatest threat to America comes from within.”
— Associated Press
“Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style . . . with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor.”
— The New York Times
"Lucid . . . a forceful argument for investing in education to lower the barriers to opportunity . . . Readers will come for the insider details about Trump, but stay for the keen analysis."
— Publishers Weekly
FIONA HILL
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. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.
She has researched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, regional conflicts, energy, and strategic issues. Coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, she holds a master's degree in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from Harvard University and a master's in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She also has pursued studies at Moscow's Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages.
Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in the Washington, DC, area.
STEPHEN SESTANOVICH
Stephen Sestanovich is the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama, published by Knopf in February 2014.
From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. He has also served as vice president for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, director of Soviet and East European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He comments frequently on international issues for radio and television, and has written for Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, American Interest, New Republic, Politico Magazine, National Interest, and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.