The Kennan Diaries
*Starred Review* Few American diplomats and historians were as prominent and as honored as George Kennan, whose posthumous profile remains high due to the 2011 biography by John Lewis Gaddis and now this edition of diaries Kennan kept during his longlifetime. They reveal, among other things, that he was anything but satisfied by the outward-appearing success of his life and career(s); a querulous tone about the courses of both permeates his private writing. If complaint is one characteristic of the entries, melancholy is another as Kennan confesses unhappiness with many things, from sexuality to American  society and democracy to the U.S. Department of State. Perhaps psychic candor motivated his diary-keeping (though Kennan writes quite guardedly about his probable infidelities), but as important an impulse was his desire that his ideas, philosophical and political, be published. Kennan, of course, did this in a best-selling book (Around the Cragged Hill, 1993), but in this format his ideas appear in unrefined though typically trenchant form. Readers familiar with Kennan’s place in the hardheaded arena of international relations may be surprised to meet the fragile and often despairing personality in these diaries but will respect the searching honesty with which he examined his experiences of witnessing the turbulent twentieth century. --Gilbert Taylor