At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995

The Pultizer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Around the Cragged Hill reflects on the political events and policies of latter part of the twentieth century, discussing the Cold War, recent changes in the former Soviet Union, and their implications.

In one of the best pieces in this miscellany of essays, speeches, lectures and reviews, Kennan sketches a series of vivid autobiographical flashbacks: living in a wooden cottage with his wife in independent Latvia in 1932 and in Moscow in 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges; his banishment from the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1952, ending his Foreign Service career. In another provocative article, he dismisses as "intrinsically silly and childish" the claim that the Reagan administration decisively influenced the breakup of the U.S.S.R., thereby winning the Cold War. Drawing on six decades of experience as ambassador to Moscow and as State Department policy maker, Kennan offers a magisterial overview of our tragic century, marked by two world wars and a Cold War that in his opinion has led the U.S. into a wasteful, draining military buildup. Several selections comprise a running commentary on the breakup of the Soviet Union; there's also a comparison of the recent Balkan war with the Balkan fracas of 1913. Analyzing Russia's current relations with new surrounding states, Kennan concludes that fears in the West that Russia is imperialistic and aggressive are unwarranted. History Book Club and BOMC selections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Forty glittering, insightful essays, speeches, and reviews on the tumultuous 20th century, from nonagenarian Kennan, the dean of diplomatic historians (Around the Cragged Hill, 1993; Sketches from a Life, 1989). Throughout his career as both historian and diplomat, Kennan has kept a penetrating, skeptical eye on totalitarian regimes, notions of national self-determination, and moral crusades by both right-wingers and liberals. This volume's essays--which deal with the dislocations caused by two world wars, the Cold War, and Russia and Eastern Europe in the postCold War era--could have used a tougher editorial hand to select both fewer and less overlapping essays. Still, they display Kennan's considerable gifts as stylist and analyst, as well as some limitations of his perspective. Kennan's ability to connect tsarist and Communist legacies to current events is magisterial, and his writing is supple, by turns analytic, ironic, lyrical, and eloquent (``one should be aware of all the collective hysterias of modern nationalism--the artificially fanned hatreds, the chauvinistic self-idealization, the professions of noble principle''). On the other hand, Kennan's record as prognosticator is mixed: While correctly predicting the USSR's internal collapse and renewed ethnic unrest and violence in the Balkans, he also underestimated the chances of success for the START talks--and, in light of the recent Russian parliamentary elections, his dismissal of a government headed by ex-Communists or ultranationalists looks premature. Moreover, his complaint about conducting foreign affairs under the microscope of election- obsessed pols ignores a more dire alterative: a foreign-policy misadventure by a dictatorial regime shielded from public opinion. Imagine a 20th-century Henry Adams and you might get the sense of Kennan here: elegant, subtle, elitist, and horrified by the ideological convulsions that have engulfed his world. (Book-of-the- Month Club and History Book Club selections) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reflecting on the collapse of the Soviet Union, political insider Kennan argues that we should abandon Cold War assumptions that military might is the way to bring down totalitarian regimes.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Readers of Kennan's best-selling Around the Cragged Hill (1993) will detect echoes of his philosophy in this collection of recent writings. Predominantly about foreign policy and the consequences of the conclusion of the communist era, the pieces exemplify the author's inimitably elegant style; in substance, they take characteristically contrarian directions. His admonitions are to be expected from one who believes that we, no less than the Russians, were damaged by the cold war's expensive military competition, that nuclear weapons are wildly out of control, that democracy and independence of nation-states don't ipso facto promote the well-being of peoples, and that flawed humans had best acknowledge their personal and political limitations. Because Kennan has a living memory of Stalinist tyranny, it pops up everywhere, in the author's evocative reminiscences of his diplomatic postings to Moscow; in his indicting review of Gromyko's memoirs, an exercise in amnesia that recalled only glory in the Stalinist edifice; or in his own intriguing private letter to biographer Robert Tucker. Topics, such as the American enthusiasm for humanitarian interventions, or Russia's relations with its "near abroad," Kennan examines with an analytical trenchancy few writers attain but that, paradoxically, few people of influence ever heed. But read him the serious public will. Gilbert Taylor