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Title: Memoirs, 1925-1950 by George Frost Kennan ISBN: 0-09-085800-X Publisher: Hutchinson Pub. Date: 1968 Format: Unknown Binding |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A must-read for anyone involved in foreign affairs
Comment: In a very different period of time, I have travelled to (or lived in) almost all the places described in these memoirs. Furthermore, I have confronted - a generation or so removed - many similar anecdotes, characters and bureaucratic missteps. This book has a ring of authenticity that is striking. It describes the ordinary and then shifts smoothly to the momentous. I have not found anything else quite like it. (Leigh White's 'The Long Balkan Night' has this similar feature, but it's the story of a journalist).
With all of that said, I was nonetheless struck by Kennan's essential desire to survive by avoiding any personal risk. He was a successful bureaucrat. During his life, he derived his status entirely from his position, or membership in an organization, and not from any personal endeavour.
How many today would naively do as Kennan and, during a whole career, derive status from membership? There are too many other things on offer. And the bureaucracy now is, well, too bureaucratic. Thank God.
Rating: 1
Summary: kennan's filth
Comment: His writing lacks coherency and he seems as though he genuinely has no knowledge of the subject, a thoroughly challenging book with no discernable benefit. The conclusion is inadequate and unjust, perhaps he should learn the facts first.
Rating: 5
Summary: Historically Significant and Equally Sensitive - Rare Combo
Comment: It is extremely rare that the memoirs of someone who played a truly significant role in his country's history are also beautifully and sensitively written. They candidly reveal the shy and introspective man who also happen to have been a critical player in the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union from the 1940s through the 1980s (from the late 1920s thorugh the 1950s in his governmental role and as historian and critic since then). Kennan is candid, brilliant, critical, and happens to have a wonderful writing style. This is personal history at its best. If you've read this one (which won the Pulitzer Prize), be sure to read the sequel.
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Title: Memoirs : 1950-1963 by George F. Kennan ISBN: 0394716264 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 August, 1983 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Sketches from a Life by George Frost Kennan ISBN: 0393321398 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Witness to History 1929-1969 by Charles E. Bohlen ISBN: 0393074765 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 1973 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department by Dean Acheson ISBN: 0393304124 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1987 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Diplomacy by Sir Harold George Nicolson ISBN: 0934742529 Publisher: Georgetown Univ Inst for the Pub. Date: November, 1988 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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