Sketches from a Life (Magill Book Reviews)
At a glance:
- Author: George F. Kennan
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Miscellany
- Genres: Nonfiction, Diary, Letters
- Subjects: Politics, Europe or Europeans, Historians, Politicians, Soviet Union or Soviets, Diplomacy or diplomats, Geopolitics
- Locales: Africa, France, United States, Mexico, Soviet Union, England, Germany, China, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, India, Czechoslovakia, Middle East, Estonia, Latvia
The broad range of these writings--letters, journal entries, stories, and published essays--presents a man of extraordinary integrity and self-honesty. Kennan is consumed with nostalgia both for what he missed from bygone eras and, as he ages, for what he misses from his own past. Throughout the half-century of journal entries, he remains true to this nostalgia.
Kennan expresses his nostalgia in negative terms as a growing pessimism about the Western world, particularly the seeming vicariousness of the daily American experience and the drabness of the European welfare state. To...
[The entire page is 646 words long]
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