Sketches from a life /

One of the "Six Wise Men" of post-World War II American foreign affairs, Kennan displays a breadth of culture buttressing his innate wisdom in these selections from his personal journals going back as far as 1927. From that time to the present, he has been a reporting officer in the foreign service, historian, diplomat, and commentator on international problems (most famously, as author of the crucial "Mr. X" article on containment in Foreign Affairs). Kennan classifies these journal selections as "isolated bits of reality, casually observed," and though not written originally for publication, they evince that polish and completeness readers have come to expect from works he intended to publish from the start. Overall, Kennan chronicles here a marked disintegration of European civilization in masterful writing. No index. --Allen Weakland

``Wistful and wise, these travel notes distilled from a long career in diplomatic service and private wanderlust reveal Kennan as a citizen of the world, though one who may be truly at home nowhere,'' noted PW. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

As always, Kennan offers a unique perspective on history, even in the context of these memoirs. This is a collection of very private reflections spanning some 60 years of foreign service in Nazi Germany, the Baltic states, the Low Countries, the Soviet Union, as well as nonofficial travels covering the entire globe. Kennan has marvelous insight into his ever-changing surroundings--an insight that is always sharp, sometimes melancholy, and punctuated frequently by dry, Midwestern wit. His ardent opposition to the arms race is clear in postwar entries which express a mounting concern for the future of his country and the planet. Along with Kennan's other works, this will form a fitting legacy to one of America's greatest historians.-- Joseph W. Constance Jr., Boston Coll. Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kennan, one of the ""six wise men"" who helped shape the postwar world, author of The Cloud of Danger, The Nuclear Delusion, and 14 others, demonstrates in this selection of journal entries dining as far back as six decades the breadth of his wisdom in foreign policy and other matters. These diary entries--Kennan's ""private luxury. . .a digression. . .from daily life in general""--span such topics as the author's thoughts upon hearing tire young Horowitz in recital in 1927: ""When he played. . .it seemed as though he himself were being played upon by some unseen musician--as though every note were being wrung out of him"": on reading Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, which prompts him to rue how ""life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. . .arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches they are too common""; or on the proclivity of Russian grandeur and imagination to start some ""fantastic colossus of a project, build part of it hastily and with bad materials, never finish it, and then leave the beginnings to rot away or be used for other utterly incongrous purposes."" Kennan also writes poignantly of the disintegration of European civilization and of the brutal pace of change: ""A man's life. . .is too long a span today for the pace of change. If he lives more than a half century, his familiar world, the world of his youth, tails him like a horse dying under its rider. . .We older people are the guests of this age, permitted to haunt its strange and somewhat terrifying halls. . ."" Kennan has written more influential books, but never one more personably captivating. with insight on every page. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.