DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Good Die Young

The Verdict on Henry Kissinger

Greg Grandin editor Bhaskar Sunkara editor Rene Rojas editor Jonah Walters editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Verso Books

Published:2nd Jan '24

Should be back in stock very soon

The Good Die Young cover

Kissinger is dead but his blood-soaked legacy endures

If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, Henry Kissinger is the specter haunting its dusty hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive attempts at expansion. For multiple generations of antiwar activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the US war machine. The Good Die Young assesses a career too frequently applauded in essays from respected scholars and journalists such as Gerald Horne, Carolyn Eisenberg, and Chip Gibbons, with an introduction from Bancroft Prize-winner Greg Grandin.

The world Kissinger wrought is one we live in today, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. Breaking that cycle means placing the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs.

The book follows Kissinger's fiery trajectory across the globe, covering Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. More than any other public figure, the life and career of this man illustrate the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless conflict that plagues us today.

Among all this catharsis, no one could surpass the 'unbeatable levels of hater' reached by the lefty publishers Jacobin magazine and Verso Books...[The Good Die Young] features essays by celebrated scholars like Gerald Horne and Carolyn Eisenberg on the wide-spanning breadth of Kissinger's noxious foreign-policy legacy and the areas of the world still hurting thanks to his time in power. -- Nitish Pahwa * Slate *
The collection strikes a blackly comic but erudite tone, opening with an introduction by Yale professor Greg Grandin that explores how Kissinger's intellectual and professional trajectory unfolded across presidential administrations and in parallel with American power at large. -- Sophia Nguyen * The Washington Post *

ISBN: 9781788730303

Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 12mm

Weight: 172g

176 pages