Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost - The Gran Strategy of Charles Hill

by Molly Worthen

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Houghton Mifflin, 2005. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/w/DJ. No Remainder Marks Minor wear to dust jacket. As a college freshman, Molly Worthen wrote the words "Charles Hill is God" on the inside cover of her History and Politics notebook. Hill was her professor, a former diplomat and behind-the-scenes operator who shaped foreign policy in his forty-year career as an adviser to Kissinger, Shultz, and Boutros-Ghali, among others. Hill's Grand Strategy class (taught with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy) developed a cult following at Yale, and Worthen soon found herself caught in his aura. Feeling the seductive pull of a guru- someone who reduces a messy world to its essence, offering a beguiling set of principles to live by- she was determined to get inside Hill's head. Surprisingly, Hill granted Worthen full access to his life, meticulously documented in over 25,000 pages of notes on everything from Iran-contra to the dissolution of his marriage. And Worthen in turn applied all the lessons Hill taught her to the study and understanding of him. In the end, she was forced to reconcile Hill's godlike presence with the person she came to realize was brilliant but fallible. The result is a genre-busting book- one that charts the intricate relationship between biographer and subject, student and teacher, even as it illuminates a momentous period in American history. Psychologically astute and masterfully written, it lays bare the joy as well as the heartache of coming to know someone you once revered. Even more profoundly, it portrays a young woman's search to find her own voice as she and her entire generation struggle to figure out how the world really works.