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17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Totally New and Fascinating Kind of Biography, January 16, 2006
Don't believe the Publishers Weekly reviewer, who missed the point entirely. This book is wise, compelling, eye-opening, and, at times, very funny. Worthen--who was only 21 when she started writing this book--questions all the old assumptions about how to write someone's biography, especially the biography of someone still living. She transforms what might have been just an interesting story--the life of an obscure but powerful foreign service officer--into an elegant and perceptive meditation about the relationship between students and teachers, the morality of power and war, and the purpose of higher education.
The book is full of startling information based on painstaking research and interviews, and sheds fascinating light on life at one of the country's best universities. Her portrait of life at Yale--and especially the now-famous and exclusive Grand Strategy seminar--offers insight into how young Americans think about the world and their place in it. The connections between Worthen's take on the subject and the ideas of David Brooks (notably his "Organization Kid" article from the Atlantic a few years back) are striking (and unsurprising, given that it was a column by Brooks in the New York Times that launched this book).
Students of foreign policy and strategy will want to read this book for its candid and behind-the-scenes take on life at the highest levels of the US government. Through Charles Hill, her subject, Worthen offers an object lesson in how power is used and foreign policy made, first in Vietnam, then in the office of Henry Kissinger, then at the top of the Reagan Administration. Of huge value here are the thousands of pages of verbatim notes that Hill took as George Shultz's right-hand-man during the Reagan years. Worthen was the first researcher to have access to what will surely become known as one of the most important documents of American foreign policy of the 20th century. This alone is worth the price of admission.
But what's most impressive about the book is Worthen's voice. She starts the story by telling it though the eyes of a college freshman: 18 years old, idealistic, and naive. Over the course of the story, she matures and gains wisdom and perspective, casting doubt on her old assumptions and coming to a new understanding of how the world works. Her insight, compelling voice, and willingness to challenge assumptions--about the relationship between mentor and student, the morality of power, the grand strategy of a life, and even of how biography should be written--make this book a stunning achievement for someone of such a young age.
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12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great read!, January 17, 2006
This is a fascinating book. Worthen was still an undergraduate at Yale when she began it, and she brings both the idealism of youth and a mature writing style to the page. Besides being a fly on the wall at some of the most important foreign policy events of the 20th century, the reader also gets an inside view of one of Yale University's most elite communities -- the Grand Strategy program, which trains future leaders in the art of statecraft. Followers of contemporary political events will be particularly interested, since two of the Grand Strategy professors -- John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill -- have close contacts with, and regularly advise the Bush Administration. This is no tawdry expose of secret societies (a la Secrets of the Tomb), but an insightful look into how an experienced diplomat mentors some of the most accomplished students in our country. It also is a moving coming of age story, as Worthen learns that her mentor is as flawed and human as the famous leaders he counseled.
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Book, January 16, 2006
This is a superb book. As a Yale freshman, Molly Worthen encountered Charles Hill as a professor. In a past life, he was a US Foreign Service Officer whose apparently ordinary career was distinguished by the extraordinary trust reposed in him by some of the more towering figures of recent American history and by his equally extraordinary intellectual ambition. His avid note-taking helped to catapult him up the Foreign Service food chain and to land him in hot water with the Iran-Contra investigation, to which Worthen, drawing on his unpublished contemporaneous notes, devotes considerable attention (and finds that he and the State Department at large were mostly innocent victims of Kenneth Walsh's over-zealousness).
To those who have been students, Worthen's initial surprise that professors--even forbidding and remote ones like Hill--are people as well as professors will sound familiar and even cliched. Less familiar, and not at all cliched, was Worthen's discontent with this simplistic picture and her determination to paint a more truthful one, even at the risk of puncturing her own easy idealism. In Hill, she found someone interesting enough to merit further scrutiny and brave (or foolhardy) enough to permit it. On very basic level, this book is a common story of coming to know someone you admire, told with uncommon skill. It deserves acclaim on this ground alone.
But the book is far richer than that. Around the unifying theme of grand strategy, Worthen explores some big questions, especially the tension between individuals and the greater good, and between reality and ideas, as manifested in the tension between family and work in Hill's own life. Wisely, Worthen decided to seek out and tell the story of his ex-wife, whom he caused a great deal of pain, alongside his own, and her portrait of Hill is far more complex than it otherwise would have been. By searching for the full truth about her professor at the risk of complicating her initial hero worship, by incorporating his warts without losing sight of his wisdom, and by recording the evolution of her views about him in their entirety (even the ones she admits to cringing at), she displays commendable courage, sobriety, and honesty--rare enough for someone at any age, but quite astonishing for one of hers.
The quality of her prose makes this book flow quickly, but the questions she tackles should linger. A marvelous accomplishment.
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