Volume 43, Number 13 · August 8, 1996
Prophet With Honor
By Warren Zimmermann
At a Century's Ending:Reflections, 1982—1995
by George F. Kennan
Norton, 351 pp., $27.50
George Kennan's ninety-two-year life spans a century with which he has grown progressively uneasy. On the first page of his new and absorbing collection of essays he calls the twentieth century 'a tragic one in the history of European (including American) civilization.' Kennan is a historical and cultural pessimist who laments the hierarchy and order destroyed by World War I. To that war he traces the Bolshevik Revolution ('a calamity of epochal dimensions for the peoples upon whom it was imposed'), the rise of Nazism, World War II, the disintegration of Europe's colonial empires, the introduction of nuclear weapons, and the cold war.
Review, 3444 words
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