In this remarkable new 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.
Only through knowledge of Kissinger’s early life (as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a poor immigrant in New York, a GI at the Battle of the Bulge, an interrogator of Nazis, and a student of history at Harvard) can we understand his debt to the philosophy of idealism.