Ebook: On Grand Strategy

A master class in strategic thinking, distilled from the legendary program the author has co-taught at Yale for decades

For almost two decades, Yale students have competed for admission each year to the "Studies in Grand Strategy" seminar taught by John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Hill. Its purpose has been to prepare future leaders for responsibilities they will face, through lessons drawn from history and the classics. Now Gaddis has distilled that teaching into a succinct, sharp and potentially transformational book, surveying statecraft from the ancient Greeks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and beyond. An unforgettable guide to the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, its own master class.

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Review

“An extraordinary treatise on the need to teach the principles of sound strategy to today’s leaders…The book…is a rich one. It makes sense of our world, but is also capable of beautifully crafted pithy historical judgments…It is a book that cares about liberty, choice and a moral compass, that warns against the hubris of an angry Bonaparte on the turn in a Russian winter, against leaders who do not listen or learn. A training manual for our troubled times.”
—The Times (UK)

“A fine summary of the complex concepts explored in [Gaddis’s] Grand Strategy seminar, full of vivid examples of leadership and strategic thinking, from the Persian king Xerxes to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s WWII strategies…Gaddis brings a deep knowledge of history and a pleasingly economical prose style to this rigorous study of leadership.”  —Publishers Weekly

“A capacious analysis of how leaders make strategic decisions…A lively, erudite study of the past in service of the future.” —Kirkus Reviews 

On The Cold War: A New History
 
“Outstanding . . . The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written.” *- The Boston Globe
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“Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject.” - The New York Times
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“A fresh and admirably concise history . . . Gaddis’s mastery of the material, his fluent style and eye for the telling anecdote make his new work a pleasure.” - The Economist
 
 
On George F. Kennan: An American Life*
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
 
''Magisterial . . . [Kennan] bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging, and exasperating American public servants . . . We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational­—a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis' moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.'' - Henry A. Kissinger, New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] first-rate biography . . . Kennan's life maps right onto twentieth-century political history, and no one is better qualified than Gaddis to lead the way through it . . . Gaddis has written with care and elegance, and he has produced a biography whose fineness is worthy of its subject.” –The New Yorker

About the Author

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, and was the founding director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, biography, and historical methodology. He has won two undergraduate teaching awards at Yale and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His George F. Kennan:  An American Life, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.