Kennan: A Life between Worlds

Description

A definitive biography of the U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George F. Kennan. The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy - and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honoured by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about - one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Frank Costigliola is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His books include The Kennan Diaries and Roosevelt's Lost Alliances (Princeton). He raises grass-fed beef cattle in Storrs, Connecticut.

"A Spectator Book of the Year" "As diplomat, historian and public intellectual, George Kennan was arguably the most interesting American of his time. In this magnificent biography, Professor Costigliola presents the man in full: gifted, prophetic, prickly, prejudiced, patriotic, alienated from modernity and steadfast in his devotion to principle. A remarkable biography of a remarkable individual."---Spectator, Andrew Bacevich "Informative, clear-eyed, and compelling."---Glenn C. Altschuler, Star Tribune "The fullest portrait of Kennan yet available."---Patrick Iber, New Republic "Absorbing, skillfully wrought. . . . consistently fascinating."---Fredrik Logevall, Foreign Affairs "A valuable contribution to understanding Kennan for who he really was."---Damir Marusic, Washington Examiner " A valuable resource for students of 20th-century geopolitics. " * Kirkus Reviews * "Costigliola's . . . biography of George Kennan . . . could not be more timely." * Library Journal *