Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Kennan: A Life between Worlds by Frank Costigliola ’68

November 8, 2023

Tags Alumni Book

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023).

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) is considered one of the most important figures in American foreign policy - and one of its most complex. According to the publisher, “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.” The author, the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, has spent over three decades studying Kennan and draws from this expertise as well as careful examination of his diaries. One reviewer noted: “The Kennan who emerges from these pages is a man of riveting contradictions: an intuitive expert torn between propriety and philandering, authoritarianism and democracy, the containment policies he launched and the Russophilic longings that he could never satisfy. This is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how hot-blooded emotions shaped the seemingly cold-blooded realism that has guided grand strategy.”