Dirty Diplomacy: The Rough and Tumble Adventures of a Scotch Drinking, Skirt Chasing, Dictator Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror

Although the subject matter is dead serious, the picaresque subtitle reflects the defiant wit at the heart of this highly revealing memoir by the colorful and prominent former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray's brief term (2002–2004) belies his influence as a scrupulous administrator who, whatever his personal failures (and he's refreshingly up-front about them), proved incorruptible in pursuit of social justice in a nation suffering under a sadistic regime. In addition to competence, wit and considerable daring, Murray displayed a rare integrity in Tashkent that stood out among his counterparts, which was precisely what got him into trouble with both dictator Karimov's brutal totalitarian state and with his own government, which eventually resorted to an eye-opening campaign to oust him. A deluge of bureaucratic and personal information occasionally blurs the focus in this book, but Murray uses the full weight of his ambassadorship to hold a key ally of the U.S. accountable for deep-seated economic corruption and human rights abuses—including pervasive use of torture— and runs headlong into some of the fiercest contradictions in the “war on terror.” (Oct.)