IF YOU REMEMBER Fiona Hill, I expect it is because of her brave and revealing testimony in the first Trump impeachment trial. I imagine that testimony had a lot to do with why she got a book deal.
Such being the case, I was expecting that testimony to be the book's big set piece: what led to her being called to testify, how it felt to be in the national headlines for a number of days, what it felt like to be in that room, and so on.
But...no. A few pages early in the book on picking out her outfit. That's about it.
What Hill really wants to write about, it turns out, is what she had to cope with as the daughter of a working class family in northern England: the petty snobbery of classmates, teachers who dismissed her abilities, the class warfare of the Thatcher era. The title is her father' advice to her, telling her to forget about trying to get ahead in County Durham.
Hill pivots from the story of her own against the-odds rise to the top of her profession to the story of how the ever-shrinking opportunities for working class people in the USA made possible the election of Trump. The problem of self-perpetuating elites and the resentment they generate among the excluded and marginalized is the book's main (and continually underlined) point.
And it's a fair point. I would have liked maybe a chapter or two on that, though, and a lot more about testifying in an historic impeachment trial.
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