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George F. Kennan
- An American Life
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hilgartner
- Length: 31 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pulitzer Prize, Biography/Autobiography, 2012
National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2012
Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.
In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the “Long Telegram” and the “X Article”, which set forward the strategy of containment that would define US policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a prizewinning historian, and would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics, and culture during the last half of the 20th century.
Now the full scope of Kennan’s long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today’s most important Cold War scholars. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 30 years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan’s death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.
We see Kennan’s insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.
This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
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This author twists history out of context for her own political agend to paint white makes in history as xenophobic, sexist.
- By Elizabeth Fosson on 09-23-21
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Not One Inch
- America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate
- By: M.E. Sarotte
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House-Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how the United States successfully overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO to more than 900 million people. But it also reveals how Washington's hardball tactics transformed the era between the Cold War and the present day, undermining what could have become a lasting partnership.
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America's NATO problem
- By Jeffrey D on 03-24-22
By: M.E. Sarotte
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The Twilight Struggle
- What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today
- By: Hal Brands
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States is entering an era of great-power competition with China and Russia. Such global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today.
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one word
- By Stormchaser on 12-06-23
By: Hal Brands
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1848
- Year of Revolution
- By: Mike Rapport
- Narrated by: Hugh Kermode
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1848, a violent storm of revolutions ripped through Europe. The torrent all but swept away the conservative order that had kept peace on the continent since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 - but which in many countries had also suppressed dreams of national freedom. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution, and they would not be witnessed again until 1989, with the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.
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1848 by Mike Rapport
- By Aria Amirbahman on 02-07-22
By: Mike Rapport
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The Enlightenment That Failed
- Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1830
- By: Jonathan I. Israel
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 60 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The Enlightenment That Failed explores the growing rift between those Enlightenment trends and initiatives that appealed exclusively to elites and those aspiring to enlighten all of society by raising mankind's awareness, freedoms, and educational level generally. Jonathan I. Israel explains why the democratic and radical secularizing tendency of the Western Enlightenment, after gaining some notable successes during the revolutionary era (1775-1820) in numerous countries, especially in Europe, North America, and Spanish America, ultimately failed.
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Enlightened radical
- By Anonymous User on 07-02-22
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The Brothers
- John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War
- By: Stephen Kinzer
- Narrated by: David Cochran Heath
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the backdrop ofAmerican culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?
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A duel biography
- By Jean on 09-26-14
By: Stephen Kinzer
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The End of Empire
- Attila the Hun & the Fall of Rome
- By: Christopher Kelly
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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History remembers Attila, the leader of the Huns, as the Romans perceived him: a savage barbarian brutally inflicting terror on whoever crossed his path. Following Attila and the Huns from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the court of Constantinople, Christopher Kelly portrays Attila in a compelling new light, uncovering an unlikely marriage proposal, a long-standing relationship with a treacherous Roman general, and a thwarted assassination plot.
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LISTEN TO THE SAMPLE
- By Chelsea on 03-23-21
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Gorbachev
- His Life and Times
- By: William Taubman
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 32 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save.
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The Man Who Changed The Course Of History
- By Jean on 12-30-17
By: William Taubman
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Germania
- In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History
- By: Simon Winder
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 18 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Propelled by a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that so many Germans have worked to rebuild, Germania was recorded to enlighten us on serious topics, curiosities, and on the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.
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Very Droll but Almost Entirely Uninformative
- By Timothy Verseput on 03-13-19
By: Simon Winder
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Lotharingia
- A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
- By: Simon Winder
- Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
- Length: 18 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe. In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany, and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.
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The Loquacious Traveler in Middle Earth
- By Doris on 11-22-19
By: Simon Winder
What listeners say about George F. Kennan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Vermontman
- 11-17-22
Excellent Biography Perfectly Read
This is the authorized biography of Kennan. It is both admiring and critical, as Kennan was about himself. Kennan’s own views of himself are available in his Diaries covering most of the 20th century as well as his two sets of Memoirs.
This is long and detailed as the subject merited. I’ve always thought that part of Kennan’s brilliance was his wonderful writing style that he applied to nearly everything he ever produced. The perfect (there is no other word for it) reading brings that style front and center in long passages read as one supposes Kennan would have read them.
I often wonder if anyone in foreign service now thinks in broad terms as did Kennan and his various colleagues and adversaries. Given the polarization of the world at the present moment, some larger view of the interests of various nations, with the great scope Kennan brought to his work, might help the current great powers from conflict.
Whether you agree or disagree with Kennan’s approach, this biography makes him a real person and shows both the positive and negative influences on his thinking.
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- peter fuller
- 06-05-18
wow. what a fantastic book and so much content!
to appreciate the man Kennan, the author does not rush or skim over the everyday pivots of George.
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- Jeff Lacy
- 01-07-21
Intelligent and illuminating biography
John Lewis Gaddis has provided another intelligent, richly sourced, well written,and illuminating book, here the biography of George Kennan. A dense book, Malcolm Hilgartner enhances an appreciation and comprehension of the book if one desires to read the book while listening to the Audible. Hilgartner is clear and his performance is well modulated. This book deserved its accolades. Robust and generous, it is an exception biography of a brilliant and meaningful American.
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 09-18-19
China and Russia
When Churchill gave his famous “iron curtain” speech in March 1946, George Kennan already understood the iron curtain’s implication and consequence. Kennan is known as “the father of containment” during the Cold War of 1947-1989.
The relevance of Kennan’s containment policy resonates with today’s American relationship with China. However, its relevance is one of contrast; not similarity. Today, there is no iron curtain that separates China from the rest of the world. The iron curtain has become a cloak. It is a cloak that obscures intent.
Kennan recognizes Stalinist Russia’s pursuit of world domination as a Marxian belief of inevitability. With an eastern Russian’ ethos that endorsed persistence and patience (a quality we see in China today) Russia reveals its strength and weakness.
The Stalinist ideology that the collective is more important than the individual evolves in Russia but its evolution retains belief in force and intervention as reliable tools for world domination. That belief is Putin’s Achilles heal.
Because of Kennan’s extraordinary foreign language ability, he became a fluent Russian language expert on Soviet affairs. He was a student of pre and post-revolutionary Russian’ culture; he used that knowledge to forge an American foreign policy to deal with Russian expansion after WWII; i.e., his prescient grasp of Stalin’s mind, and the Russian culture, allowed the United States to contain the Russian empire within Eastern Europe by limiting American overt action and covert action through confrontation, black-ops, and diplomacy.
George Kennan’s biography reinforces a belief that understanding another culture requires emergence in that culture. Ambassadors that are not fluent in a culture’s language and fail to spend years in that culture’s environment cannot understand what policies America should adopt to protect itself and promote world peace and freedom. One wishes all American Presidents would recognize that need in Ambassadors representing the United States.
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- Curious Dan
- 05-07-16
An Underrated Hero
A great man....probably saved the world from nuclear annihilation, although we'll never know for sure.
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- Doris Serheev
- 04-11-17
Good biography of an important man
Well written and important work on an intriguing personality and an important figure in the history of the period after WWII. George Kennan played a critical role in the period after the war and the US and Europe was well served by his intelligence and capability in planning and implementing the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe from utter rubble.
Indeed it's hard to overestimate his importance in guiding U.S. policy.who knows where we'd be today without his. That said it's hard to understand his changing views from his containment policy to anti NATO position in his later years. If there is a flaw in this book it really leaves this question unanswered. Still it's a masterful biography of a life dedicated to public service and principled ideals. Wish we could have a G. Kennan around today. Bravo to the author in covering his life so well in this work.
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- Philip
- 12-07-12
Good if you're serious about foreign affairs
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
This is a serious scholarly book. If you're in the mood for 40 hours of intellectual rigor this is an excellent book
Any additional comments?
The reader is v good except when he does awful English accents and awful imitations of women
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- Stephen S S Hyde
- 02-03-19
Maybe the most important unfamous American
Wonderful bio of one of the 20th Century's most influential foreign policy analysts and writers.
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- Priya Vashishta
- 06-22-23
Excellent book and very nice reading
This is a really important book by a great strategist and thinker of 20th century. I really enjoyed the book and it’s narration.
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- Muttering Beduwen
- 06-10-12
Kennan: a man who needs to be studied
First of all let me say I am thrilled to see this kind of book in audio, very seldom do we get a major scholarly work of this magnitude in audio. As a serious student of international relations Kennan needs to be studied. for better or worse it was his thought process that served as the guiding light for American Foreign Policy until the end of the Cold War. The thing that changed was the interpretation of Kennan's ideas.
Being the owner of 400 audiobooks i can comfortably say that the narrator is one of the best I have herd and perfect for a book of this size.
I will be the first to admit the audience who will truly appreciate this book among the general population is small but for student of history and/or the international system this book is a must read.
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17 people found this helpful