Kissinger
  • Published: 14 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141022000
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 1008
  • RRP: $42.99
Categories:

Kissinger

1923-1968: The Idealist

Formats & editions
EBook
29 Sep 2015
Paperback
14 Nov 2016
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The definitive biography of Henry Kissinger, based on unprecedented access to his private papers, written by one of our greatest historians

No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Hailed by some as the \"indispensable man\", whose advice has been sought by every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, Kissinger has also attracted immense hostility from critics who have cast him as an amoral Machiavellian - the ultimate cold-blooded \"realist\".

In this remarkable book, the first of two volumes, Niall Ferguson has created an extraordinary panorama of Kissinger's world, and a paradigm-shifting reappraisal of the man. Drawing not only on Kissinger's hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, this biography is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece. Like his classic two-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds dazzling new light on an entire era.
  • Published: 14 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141022000
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 1008
  • RRP: $42.99
Categories:

About the author

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is a Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire and Colossus, he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Since 2003 he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for Channel Four: Empire, American Colossus and, most recently, The War of the World. He, his wife and three children divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

Also by Niall Ferguson

Empire
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
The Square and the Tower
The Ascent of Money
The Great Degeneration
Civilization
High Financier
See all

Praise for Kissinger

This will be his masterpiece

Andrew Roberts, New York Times

I acquired valuable knowledge, elegantly conveyed

Paul Johnson, Standpoint Magazine

The book illustrates just what an extraordinary human being Kissinger is

Robert Service, Daily Telegraph

A work of engrossing scholarship

The Economist

this is a superb history of the modern world as well as a biography of Kissinger... Ferguson's tour de force shows that because Kissinger was a refugee from horror he understood from the day he first saw the Statue of Liberty that US engagement is vital to the peaceful development of the world

William Shawcross, The Times

Ferguson is undoubtedly persuasive in presenting the young Kissinger as a man of ideals as well as ideas. His advantage as the authorised biographer, deployed with full force, has been access to a vast mass of previously unseen private correspondence that reveals his subject as nothing like the calucating cold fish of legend

Marcus Tanner, Independent

With his usual meticulous research, Ferguson is master of all his work surveys. At least as important, he writes in an unobtrusive but compelling style that carries the reader along with unforced ease. Even on its own, the first volume of Ferguson's life of Kissinger is a great work about a great man by - it has to be admitted - a great historian. It should be read, and enjoyed, by every serious student of the history of our times

Sherard Cowper-Coles, Spectator

For big, bold and compelling, it is impossible to ignore Kissinger - 1923-1968: the idealist (Allen Lane), the first volume of Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger, which asks us to reconsider America's best-known "realist" as more Kantian than Machiavellian, more Castlereagh than Meternich, at least up to 1968, when President Nixon first granted the Harvard academic high office.

John Bew, New Statesman

Some might question whether Ferguson really needs 1000 pages to tell half of Kissinger's life. Other will revel in the wealth of detail on this most controversial of American statesman

Bee Wilson, Sunday Times

a formidably detailed, closely argued study of the making of one of the giants of 20th-century foreign policy

Gideon Rachman
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