Review: Celebrity Diplomacy, I Am America

Date01 June 2008
DOI10.1177/002070200806300227
Published date01 June 2008
Subject MatterReview
| International Journal | Spring 2008 | 515 |
| Reviews |
stints in the field, Watson’s cumulative experience becomes his greatest asset.
He is able to weave together many of the murky connections of the post 9/11
world. He was there.
With this book, Watson joins the company of some of the finest modern
writers who have dared to document their wartime experiences (Anthony
Loyd’s
My War Gone By I Miss it So
comes to mind). All students of inter-
national affairs should understand what—even if by choice—foreign corre-
spondents go through to translate the world beyond our borders to readers
back home.
Quoting Albert Camus, Watson says he knows where war lives: “It lives
in all of us” (xiii). One hopes that Watson’s stunning narrative of a life fully
examined will keep some of his past demons at bay.
Lara J. Nettelfield/Simon Fraser University
CELEBRITY DIPLOMACY
Andrew F. Cooper
London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. 160pp, US$18.95 paperback (ISBN
978-1594514791)
I AM AMERICA
And So Can You!
Stephen Colbert
New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. 240pp, US$26.99 hardback
(ISBN 978-0446580502)
Celebrities and the paparazzi who photograph them enjoy a strange, symbi-
otic relationship. Each relies on and uses the other for its own purposes, and
neither could exist independently. But rather than allowing themselves to be
photographed solely for self-promotion, some celebrities in recent years have
used the attention they receive to focus the cameras on serious international
issues, whether genocide in Darfur or the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.
This pragmatic use of the paparazzi’s spotlight is the main subject of Andrew
F. Cooper’s excellent
Celebrity Diplomacy
. Cooper’s main question is what
we ought to make of these celebrities’ efforts. Various actors and singers, as
well as politicians and pundits, are also the target of Stephen Colbert’s
I Am
America
, a comic manifesto that reads like the rant of a beautifully intolerant

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