(23.November) These years of Kissinger’s striving in Cambridge provide the core of Niall Ferguson’s recently published intellectual biography, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. It is the first of two volumes and it deals with Kissinger’s first forty-five years, from his birth in Weimar Germany to the day President-elect Richard Nixon appointed him as his National Security Advisor. Against the commonplace conceptualization of Kissinger as the last master-practitioner of unsentimental Realpolitik diplomacy, Ferguson’s lingering attention to Kissinger’s scholarship produced during his years at Harvard allows him to reframe Kissinger as an intellectual who sought to use ideas to transform the world.