It's a pity, as with so many modern biographers who seek to be definitive, that Gaddis could not have done the short version for those of us with a job and a life. Having said that, I was engrossed from beginning to end, and couldn't bear to skip even one of the 700 pages, despite the book consuming all my free time for weeks. Gaddis writes well; Kennan wrote with a wonderful, powerful, novelistic excellence - even in his diary. And there's so much here: run-ins with Martha Gellhorn in Prague just before WWII; being the brilliant but darkly troubled young diplomat in horrible conditions in Moscow; helping to craft the Marshall Plan (his greatest achievement?); being on chatting terms with everyone from Tito to Kennedy; steering Reagan towards a saner, slightly less lethal attitude in foreign policy. He was a mass of contradictions, and knew it: loved and loathed both America and Russia; was a charming and resilient depressive; managed to be a faithful philanderer; a liberal-minded, snobbery-free elitist; clear-sighted about totalitarianism yet impatient of democracy; despised the reckless war-mongering of Bush II yet admired "Killer" Kissinger. Despite the subtitle (Kennan's was, in several different ways, a strikingly un-American life), this is a very fine biography of an extraordinary man. As Isaiah Berlin put it, in a particularly gorgeous letter of reference: "one of the most attractive human beings I have ever met... and he has that rarest of virtues: something to say."