Fredrik Logevall Wins CFR’s 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award for "Embers of War"

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), by Cornell University’s Fredrik Logevall, won the annual Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Arthur Ross Book Award for the best book published on international affairs. Logevall, a specialist on U.S. foreign relations and the history of the Cold War and Vietnam War, will receive $15,000 and be honored at a CFR event in New York on Wednesday, December 18.

"Fred Logevall’s Embers of War is an outstanding book on a vital topic," said Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose, who chaired the selection committee. "Not only a landmark history of the French war in Vietnam and the backstory of the American war there, it is also a powerful meditation on the larger question of what outsiders can and can’t do to affect a country’s destiny. Deeply researched and beautifully written, it is everything history and security studies can and should be, and fully deserves all the accolades that have been justly heaped on it."

The jury awarded the Silver Medal and $7,500 to Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Washington Post and Slate columnist Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (Doubleday).

Economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James A. Robinson of Harvard University received an honorable mention and $2,500 for Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Crown Business).

2013 ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD JURY

Gideon Rose (Chairman), Editor, Foreign Affairs

Robert W. Kagan, The Brookings Institution

Mary Elise Sarotte, Harvard University

Stephen M. Walt, Harvard University

Endowed by Arthur Ross in 2001, this award honors nonfiction works, in English or translation, that merit special attention for bringing forth new information that changes the understanding of events or problems, developing analytical approaches that allow new and different insights into critical issues, or providing new ideas that help resolve foreign policy issues.

PAST WINNERS OF THE ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD

John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (The Penguin Press)

Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff for This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press)

Liaquat Ahamed for Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Penguin Group)

Philip P. Pan for Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (Simon & Schuster)

Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press)

Kwame Anthony Appiah for Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W. W. Norton)

Tony Judt for Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press)

Steve Coll for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press)

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon for The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America (Random House)

Samantha Power for "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)

Robert Skidelsky for John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937–1946 (Viking)

We are currently accepting Arthur Ross Book Award nominations for books published in 2013. Submissions are due by February 15, 2014.

To register for the December 18 event, email [email protected]. To learn more about the Arthur Ross Book Award or submit a nomination, visit: www.cfr.org/about/arthur_ross.html.

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The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.