Sketches from a Life [Hardcover]

George F. Kennan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 1989

Written originally as a series of entries in a travel diary and now considered one of the most important memoirs of our time, Sketches from a Life is George F. Kennan's peerless, impressionistic record of his experiences with twentieth-century history.

Beginning with his first foreign service post in 1927 and ending seven decades later, Kennan's account is rich with the insight of a major historical participant. Whether relating the perils of Hitler's Germany or revisiting Kennan's days as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sketches from a Life is as riveting as great literature, and one of the most invaluable documents of our time.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wistful and wise, these travel notes distilled from a long career in diplomatic service and private wanderlust reveal Kennan as a citizen of the world, though one who may be truly at home nowhere. Formerly an ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and to Yugoslavia, the author of The Fateful Alliance and 17 other books here reviles the Soviet system and takes to task the Europeans, who have lost control of their own destiny and are busily destroying their environment. In the U.S., he struggles to reconnect with his Wisconsin and rural Pennsylvania roots; then he hops to southern California, epitome of "childhood without the promise of maturity." Early diary entries fitfully record his bleak stays in Berlin and Moscow in the 1930s and '40s, the devastation of Europe during and after the war. Frequently impersonal, this travelogue is at its best in exquisite word-paintings that capture the spirit and significance of a time and place, whether a Florida key, African grasslands, Fez's maze-like streets, Baghdad, Mexico City, the isle of Capri.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As always, Kennan offers a unique perspective on history, even in the context of these memoirs. This is a collection of very private reflections spanning some 60 years of foreign service in Nazi Germany, the Baltic states, the Low Countries, the Soviet Union, as well as nonofficial travels covering the entire globe. Kennan has marvelous insight into his ever-changing surroundings--an insight that is always sharp, sometimes melancholy, and punctuated frequently by dry, Midwestern wit. His ardent opposition to the arms race is clear in postwar entries which express a mounting concern for the future of his country and the planet. Along with Kennan's other works, this will form a fitting legacy to one of America's greatest historians.
- Joseph W. Constance Jr., Boston Coll. Libs.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 365 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (April 29, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394575040
• ISBN-13: 978-0394575049
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #661,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Expatriate In Time Rather Than In Place, August 22, 2008

By 

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sketches from a Life (Paperback)

The late George Kennan was known as a diplomat and as a scholar. In Sketches From A Life, published when he was eighty-five years old, he also reveals himself as a writer and as a moralist. The pieces that form this volume are entries into his private diary that were written during a period spanning more than sixty years. They were not intended for publication (the author nonetheless confesses that "every diarist has moments, I am sure, of a vague hope that what he has just written, particularly if he himself is pleased with it, will some day fall under at least a few eyes other than his own." Internet has turned this hope into an instant obsession.)

Although they reveal glimpses into his inner self and contain pages from his personal history, these diary excerpts were expunged from the most intimate entries and are the opposite of a narcissistic account. What they have in common is that they were written, for the most part, only when traveling. They are a collection of sketches, by an author who also was fond of drawing and took graphic sketches of the cities and places he visited. Whether George Kennan could draw well or not is left to the imagination of the reader; but there were few domains in which he didn't excel, and writing was obviously his forte. After all, the man won two Pulitzer and published more than eighteen books.

From Hamburg and Prague to Moscow and St. Petersburg, from Riga to Mexico and Kristiansand to Pennsylvania, Kennan puts to paper beautifully rendered and exquisite prose. His ability to capture the spirit of a city in a few lines puts him among the best of travel writers ; but this lover of nature also had a talent for sketching landscapes and natural sceneries. The streets and buildings that he evokes come to life, sometimes quite literally, as in this prosopopoeia in which the old palace that shelters the American legation in Prague laments "the incorrigible vanity and tragedy and futility of all human endeavors."

Although he first came to Europe in the 1920s and never experienced pre-soviet Russia, Kennan feels much closer to the Russia that was than to the Russia that is. Certain sections of Moscow and Leningrad inspire him such a sense of familiarity "as to evoke the mystery of a former life". He is, as he acknowledges, an "expatriate in time rather than in place", and longs for a Europe that embodied the best of civilization before its plunge into chaos. By contrast, California inspires him his most scathing remarks : the place reminds him "of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many--not all--of one's friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating each other over the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now--the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant--nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again."

His penchant as a moralist emerged early in his career. One is surprised to find under the pen of a twenty-three years old sentences like the following: "we have too many friends to have any friendships, too many books to know any of them well; and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity". It is also ironic that the man who lived to hundred years old remarked, halfway through his life in 1959, "we older people are the guests of this age, permitted to haunt its strange and somewhat terrifying halls--in a way part of its life, like the guests in a summer hotel, yet in a similar way detached from it." Or as he concludes, "each generation staggers through life: occupying briefly the little patch of apparent light between the darkness of the past we have so largely forgotten and the darkness of the future that we cannot see."

5.0 out of 5 stars Skeches from a Life, July 11, 2009

By 

rocks "rocks" (Madison WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sketches from a Life (Paperback)

A very sensitive depiction of interesting experiences and one that encouraged me to begin writing a journal in 1990. Thanks George for your inspiration and fine, sensitive writing.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He had an interesting life, and the book shows it, February 23, 2007

By 

M. DUTRA (Sao Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sketches from a Life (Hardcover)

I guess if you want to write a book on sketches of your life, you've got to have lived an interesting one. And Mr Kennan did.

He lived most of his adult life abroad, mostly in Europe, with a focus in the Eastern part. This allows him to give a nice perspective of life in the Old World versus America. Also, because he lived to be 100, he can give a very good perspective timewise (he wrote the book when he was in his 80s). He comes across as a nostalgic, but it is hard not to be one when one is old, I guess.

One reviewer said that Kennan is the kind of man who owes everything to his position in an organization. It seems to be true. In the book, he is extremely passive and seems to go with the flow. He also seems not to like much interaction with people and shows more emotion about a work of art or a beautiful building than real people. He doesn't even talk much about his wife.

Nevertheless, this does not diminish the pleasure of reading the book, if you prepare yourself to a pleasant tale of distant places, both in space and time. He has been there, he has done that, that's what matters.