TY - JOUR
AU - Gurman, Hannah
AB - Book Reviews : 415 hannah g urma n John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. ix+ 700 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $39.95. John Lewis Gaddis’ much-anticipated grand biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life, on and off in the making for almost three decades, purports to paint a fuller picture of Kennan than we have ever had before. Through 700 pages of vivid and multilayered narrative, which incorporates interviews with Kennan’s family and colleagues as well as entries from his unpublished diaries, the book recreates the story of Kennan’s life, from his birth in Milwaukee in 1904 to his death in Princeton in 2005. In the tradition of grand biography, Gaddis overwhelms us with a surfeit of descriptive detail that serves in part to elaborate on things we already know. Thus, a good portion of these 700 pages “fills in” the familiar stories—adding texture to the most famous events in Kennan’s life—the publication of the “Long Telegram” in 1946 and the “X article” in 1947, Kennan’s marginalization from policy circles in 1948, and his subsequent evolution into a vocal critic of containment. The biography also devotes considerable attention to the periods before 
TI - Grand Strategy via Grand Biography
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dht010
DA - 2013-04-23
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/grand-strategy-via-grand-biography-8W07FMPP45
SP - 415
EP - 417
VL - 37
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -