Books, Arts & Manners

Years of UpheavalBy Henry KissingerLittle, Brown, 1,283 pp., $24.95 In January 1973, Richard Nixon was reinaugurated after carrying more states than any presidential candidate in history. Nineteen months later, he was out. Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger’s second volume of political memoirs, covers the foreign policy of that truncated second term.

It has become the fashion to praise Dr. Kissinger’s prose. Perhaps the most serious criticism that can be leveled against it is tempo—at 1,214 pages, not counting notes and illustrations, Years of Upheaval works out to more than two pages a day. White House Years, which covered Nixon’s first term, averaged a brisk page a day—but then it covered two and half more years. With a final volume of like size on the Presidency of Gerald Ford, Kissinger’s trilogy will be three times as long as The Lord of the Rings. Readers coming upon it for the first time in toto will feel like hiring Sherpas.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Years of UpheavalBy Henry KissingerLittle, Brown, 1,283 pp., $24.95 In January 1973, Richard Nixon was reinaugurated after carrying more states than any presidential candidate in history. Nineteen months later, he was out. Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger’s second volume of political memoirs, covers the foreign policy of that truncated second term.

It has become the fashion to praise Dr. Kissinger’s prose. Perhaps the most serious criticism that can be leveled against it is tempo—at 1,214 pages, not counting notes and illustrations, Years of Upheaval works out to more than two pages a day. White House Years, which covered Nixon’s first term, averaged a brisk page a day—but then it covered two and half more years. With a final volume of like size on the Presidency of Gerald Ford, Kissinger’s trilogy will be three times as long as The Lord of the Rings. Readers coming upon it for the first time in toto will feel like hiring Sherpas.