The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass Wins CFR’s 2014 Arthur Ross Book Award

November 25, 2014—An independent jury has selected The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Alfred A. Knopf) by Gary J. Bass as the 2014 winner of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Arthur Ross Book Award. The award identifies the best book published in 2013 on international affairs. Bass, a professor at Princeton University, will receive $15,000 and be honored at a CFR event in January.

As Harold Saunders wrote in his review of the book for Foreign Affairs, this is a “gripping, thoroughly researched, concisely organized, and engagingly written account . . . One of the casualties of Bass’ book is the concept of the rational actor at the center of international relations.”

The jury awarded the Silver Medal and a prize of $7,500 to CNA’s Carter Malkasian for War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (Oxford University Press).

The jury also awarded an Honorable Mention and $2,500 to CFR Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics Benn Steil for The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton University Press).

Additional shortlist nominees:

— Princeton University Professor Alan S. Blinder - After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (The Penguin Press)

— Brookings Institution Scholar Kenneth Pollack - Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy (Simon & Schuster)

— George Washington University Professor David Shambaugh - China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford University Press)

Endowed by the late Arthur Ross in 2001, this award honors nonfiction works, in English or translation, that bring forth new information that changes the understanding of events or problems, develop analytical approaches that offer insight into critical issues, or introduce ideas that help resolve foreign policy problems. The jury is independent of the Council on Foreign Relations and consists of a group of international affairs scholars and practitioners.

ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD JURY

Gideon Rose (Chair)
Peter G. Peterson Chair and Editor, Foreign Affairs

Robert W. Kagan
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy,

The Brookings Institution

Susan K. Purcell
Director, Center for Hemispheric Policy, University of Miami

Calvin G. Sims
President and Chief Executive Officer, International House

Andrew Ross Sorkin
Columnist and Assistant Business Editor, New York Times

Stephen M. Walt
Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs,

Harvard Kennedy School

To learn more about the Arthur Ross Book Award, 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.