Tales of Alaskas Bush Rat Governor or Henry Kissinger and the American Century

Tales of Alaska's Bush Rat Governor: The Extraordinary Autobiography of Jay Hammond, Wilderness Guide and Reluctant Politician

Author: Jay Hammond

Jay Hammond's hilarious, adventure-packed autobiography is filled with candid insights on the independent people and faraway places of our nation's largest state.

Publishers Weekly

In 1946 Hammond, a Methodist minister's son from New York State and a Marine pilot during WW II, realized his dream of moving to Alaska. Once there he had many jobs, including trapping, fishing, guiding, flying and working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He also served six years in the House beginning in 1959, the advent of statehood, then six more in the Senate. Hammond was elected governor in 1974 in an upset victory over the favored candidate who was backed by the press and the unions; in 1978 he was reelected, campaigning for a balance between industrial growth and preservation of the environment. While Hammond's political career is interesting, the main appeal of his autobiography is his portrait of his adopted state and its residents. Photos. Author tour. (May)

Booknews

Hammond served as a Marine fighter pilot during World War II, then fled civilization for Alaska's wilderness, where he became a trapper, bush pilot, wolf hunter, commercial fisherman, wilderness guide, and poet. He was governor of Alaska between 1974 and 1982, an environmentalist during the nation's oil crisis. His memoirs are lively and engaging. Distributed by Graphic Arts Center Publishing, Portland, Ore. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Henry Kissinger and the American Century

Author: Jeremi Suri

What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Jeremi Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.

Drawing on research in more than six countries in addition to extensive interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissinger's ideas and power and explains why he pursued the policies he did. Kissinger's German-Jewish background, fears of democratic weakness, belief in the primacy of the relationship between the United States and Europe, and faith in the indispensable role America plays in the world shaped his career and his foreign policy. Suri shows how Kissinger's early years in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his experiences in the U.S. Army and at Harvard University, and his relationships with powerful patrons—including Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon—shed new light on the policymaker.

Kissinger's career was a product of the global changes that made the American Century. He remains influential because his ideas are rooted so deeply in dominant assumptions about the world. In treating Kissinger fairly and critically as a historical figure, without polemical judgments, Suri provides critical context for this important figure. He illuminates the legacies of Kissinger's policies for the United States in the twenty-first century.

The Washington Post - David Greenberg

…a useful, idiosyncratic study…Suri isn't trying to compete—for audience or authoritativeness —with Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger or MacMillan's Nixon and Mao, which combine scholarly rigor with popular appeal. Rather, he's gambling that less can be more. Suri's Kissinger is an academic rumination on the cerebral Harvard professor-turned-showboating national security adviser that, while intentionally narrow in scope, is bold in its reach.

Publishers Weekly

University of Wisconsin historian Suri (Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente) endeavors to explore the philosophical roots of Henry Kissinger's actions as national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, finding those roots in a Jewish boy's experiences of a weak Weimar regime's fall to genocidal Nazism. At the end of the day, in Suri's account, Kissinger's philosophy boiled down to the need to back democracy with muscle. "America, alone of the free countries," said Kissinger, "was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity." But Kissinger's expressed idealism leads Suri to downplay the consequences of Kissinger's actions, including his role in subverting the democratically elected government of Chile's Salvador Allende. Kissinger did not support the brutality of the "regimes he supported in Chile, South Africa, and other parts of the Third World," Suri writes. But, the author acknowledges, he did "nurture personal relations with their leaders as strongmen who could mobilize force effectively against threats to themselves and the United States." At the close of that statement, Suri stumbles into the unpleasant truth of Kissinger's realpolitik. Illus. (July)

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Marcia L. Sprules - Library Journal

Suri (history, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; Power and Protest) here turns his attention to archetypal power broker Kissinger during his years in government service, ending in 1977. Throughout, the author bears in mind how Kissinger was influenced by his youth in Germany and by postwar America generally (thus distinguishing this book from Jussi Hanhimaki's Flawed Architect, which does not analyze such influences). Suri argues that the weak response of the democratic states as well as public acquiescence to the rise of the Nazis left Kissinger convinced of the need to use any means necessary to defeat evil. Suri specifies the social changes in postwar America that opened doors for those outside the traditional elites and points to Kissinger's ability to bridge previously separate worlds, which enabled him to get full benefit of these changed conditions. The author is less positive about the success of Kissinger's approach in Vietnam and the Middle East, where Kissinger's preference for dealing between nation-states, rather than with insurgencies and nonstate actors, was not an option. The archival research is extensive and the analysis thought-provoking. Although there are numerous studies of Kissinger, as well as his own memoirs, Suri's is the best at studying the man in terms of the social surroundings that influenced him. Recommended, especially for academic libraries.-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York