Michael Burleigh
His Marvellous Medicine
George F Kennan: An American Life
By John Lewis Gaddis
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 784pp £30 order from our bookshop
Contemporary American political biography is a remarkably distinguished genre, whether one thinks of presidential lives (David McCullough on Truman, Stephen Ambrose on Eisenhower and Robert Dallek on Kennedy and Johnson) or dual or group portraits, such as Kai Bird on the brothers Bundy, and Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas on the foreign policy ‘Wise Men’ – including George Frost Kennan – who guided the US through the early Cold War. Scholars such as Richard Immerman have also done much to correct caricatures of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish