Marie Yovanovitch reflects on disinformation and her removal as ambassador to Ukraine

For any career foreign service officer to rise to the level of ambassador, it takes merit, timing and more than a little luck. Marie Yovanovitch, known to many as Masha, had all three — up until a point.

Her memoir, Lessons From the Edge, is a front row seat to the disinformation campaign that ultimately saw her removed from her last overseas post: U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

This book also provides insight into the post-Soviet Union politics of Russia and Ukraine, both now dominating the news. And it pays homage to Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) and the work they do, and a career that still remains a mystery to many Americans.

To understand the former, she starts with the latter.

Yovanovitch entered the Foreign Service in 1986, where diplomats were overwhelmingly the "pale, male, Yale" model. She writes that she had one boss tell