George F. Kennan: An American Life

by John Lewis Gaddis

This masterful biography of the ‘mastermind of the Cold War’ by the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis offers a deeply reported study of one of the United States’ most influential architects of foreign policy. Kennan was reportedly so forthcoming and outspoken in interviews that he and the author agreed that it would not be published until after his death. Writing in The New York Times, Henry Kissinger declared it “as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants”