Kennan : a life between worlds

Author/Creator:

Costigliola, Frank, 1946- author

Publication/Creation:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2023]

Format:

Book

More Details

Additional/Related Title Information

Full Title:

Kennan : a life between worlds / Frank Costigliola

Subjects/Genre

Subjects:

Kennan, George F.(George Frost),1904-2005
Ambassadors--United States--Biography
Historians--United States--Biography
United States--Foreign relations--1945-1989
United States--Foreign relations--Soviet Union
Soviet Union--Foreign relations--United States

Description/Summary

Table of Contents:

Not very happy people : the Kennan family, 1904-1925 -- Seeking Russia from Germany, 1926-1933 -- The "Madness of '34" -- Stalin's Terror and Kennan's trauma, 1935-1937 -- Kennan and the descent into war, 1937-1939 -- Kennan and a world at war, 1939-1944 -- Cold War founder and skeptic, 1944-1950 -- "Chosen instrument" : Kennan's tragedy in Moscow, 1951-1952 -- Contesting the Cold War, 1953-1966 -- Kennan embattled, 1967-1982 -- Almost unstoppable, 1983-2005 -- The limits of honor.

Bibliography:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary:

"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 honored 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"--

Language:

English

Physical Type/Description:

xxii, 624 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Additional Identifiers

Catalog ID (MMSID):

9937680805702486

ISBN:

0691165408
9780691165400

OCLC Number:

1304401089

Barcode:

010003535340