Kissinger: A Biography

It was great to supplement my mostly anecdotal and popular-culture knowledge of Kissinger with this book, which greatly filled in the blanks. Isaacson more than anything shows that Kissinger was able to fashion himself into a nearly textbook example of network centrality — someone who supplanted himself into the center of nearly every power center he needed to be in through a blend of relationships and his own celebrity. The magnitude of his celebrity, and the at times stupefying way he carried it out, was not something I fully understood until reading the book.