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

"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 American foreign policy in his forty-year career as an adviser to Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros 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." "We've all had a teacher, at one time or another, who showed us the world, clarified our fuzzy thinking, and made us grow up. At Yale, Hill was worldly-wise and never afraid to tell students how to think or what to do. For a generation adrift, he proved irresistible - sometimes dangerously so - and Worthen was determined to get inside his head." "The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is the story of Worthen's quest and the man who fueled it. She began in his classroom, recording his every word in her spiral notebook, allowing him to shape her. Years later, as his biographer, she found that she was shaping him." "Surprisingly, Hill granted Worthen full access to his life, meticulously documented in over 25,000 pages of notes on everything from the Iran-Contra affair to the dissolution of his marriage. In the end, she was forced to reconcile the teacher she admired with the man she learned was brilliant, but fallible.She put Hill's classroom lessons to the ultimate test: she applied them to his own life." 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 passionately written, it lays bare the joy as well as the heartache of coming to know someone you once revered.