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9780618574674

The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780618574674

  • ISBN10:

    0618574670

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2006-02-15
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
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Supplemental Materials

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Summary

As a college freshman, Molly Worthen wrote the words "CharlesHill is God" on the inside cover of her History and Politics notebook.Hill was her professor, a former diplomat and behind-the-scenesoperator who shaped foreign policy in his forty-year career as an adviserto Kissinger, Shultz, and Boutros-Ghali, among others. Hill"s GrandStrategy class (taught with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy)developed a cult following at Yale, and Worthen soon found herselfcaught in his aura. Feeling the seductive pull of a guru--someone whoreduces a messy world to its essence, offering a beguiling set of principlesto live by--she was determined to get inside Hill"s head. Surprisingly, Hill granted Worthen full access to his life, meticulouslydocumented in over 25,000 pages of notes on everything fromIran-contra to the dissolution of his marriage. And Worthen in turnapplied all the lessons Hill taught her to the study and understanding ofhim. In the end, she was forced to reconcile Hill"s godlike presencewith the person she came to realize was brilliant but fallible. The resultis a genr

Author Biography

MOLLY WORTHEN graduated from Yale University in 2003. She received the Ellsworth Prize for most distinguished senior essay in the humanities, the Schubart Prize for best original published work, the David C. DeForest/ Townsend Premium Prize for oration, and the Kingsley Fellowship for the study of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in Alberta. She has written for the Yale Daily News, the Toledo Blade, the Dallas Morning News, and Time. Her interests include cartoon illustration, fly fishing, and improvisational comedy. She is also a national championship debater. This is her first book.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

1 The genius of Charles Hill is his silence. In books and in school we had encountered the far-off places and the Great Men whom he served: Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Israel; Ellsworth Bunker and Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But he never mentioned them in class, and as artless freshmen we had yet to pick up on the gossip that the upperclassmen traded after his lectures. Most of us were too young to remember the Iran-Contra affair, at the time preferring Saturday morning cartoons to Oliver North. We did not know that our professors notebooks helped to break open the investigation. Our ignorance was for the best. His presence, his hold on the class, was enough to make us freeze in our seats. Filled at first with the happy murmur of weekend gossip, the room snapped silent at nine oclock when Professor Hill walked in. He wore a stone-colored suit, and he did not speak or look at us until he had taken his seat at the head of the table and pulled his yellow legal pad from his backpack. The backpack, please note, was made of dignified brown leather and detracted only slightly from the overall gravity of his image. He sat leaning close to the table, his back straight and motionless as a marble figure tipping imperceptibly from its column. During the week we spent studying the Romans, Professor Hill passed around a picture of the bust of Emperor Vespasian. He called it "The Roman Face." There was a resemblance between my instructor and the emperors ancient countenance, rough-hewn and furrowed, with wide, sad eyes that laid bare a life of hard decisions. Vespasian, too, had a strong mouth that rarely looked to speak, and then only to rapt attention. The emperor even had the same ears-medium-sized, protruding just a bit. Professor Hill claimed to have never thought of the likeness. He always began class with a quiet voice, his elbows resting upon the table in perfect forty-five-degree angles. He held this position for the entire hour, save an infrequent nod or a reach for the notepad. There was never a pen or paper clip in his hand. Professor Hill did not fiddle. He called on us by our last names-I had never been called Ms. Worthen before-and whenever any of us spoke, he made a tiny mark on his notepad, as if he were an Olympic figure-skating judge. None of us ever knew whether those marks portended good or ill. Within minutes we did not trust ourselves to think or speak. We had to, however, for Professor Hill assigned one of us to lead the discussion each day. Over the course of the semester some of my classmates came to class unprepared. When they turned red and stuttered that they had forgotten it was their turn to lead, Professor Hill stared at them, silent, waiting to see what they would do. Most composed themselves and found something to say, eventually. The rest of the class took the lesson to heart. Some of us learned to stay up late, crafting the following days "spontaneous" insights in our

Excerpted from The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill by Molly Worthen
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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