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Book Review
| Henry Kissinger and the American Century. By Jeremi Suri. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. x, 358 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02579-0.)
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| When he interviewed Henry Kissinger, Jeremy Suri tells us, the former secretary of state and national security adviser to presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford was not willing to discuss his core beliefs (pp. 14–15). That left the author to go off and reconstruct Kissinger's world view however he could, a not impossible task given that the man has left a trail of academic writings and policy prescriptive studies stretching back to the 1950s, prior to his time in government, and memoirs articulating a certain version of the history in which he participated. Suri also traveled to Kissinger's hometown in Germany to get the feel for his early experiences and talk to childhood friends and acquaintances. The result is neither a traditional biography nor a history of Cold War America, but a "study of how social and political transformation across multiple societies created our contemporary world" (p. 4). |
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