American Sketches
Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
by Walter Isaacson
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Excerpt
During one of his Middle East shuttle missions in 1974, Henry Kissinger ruminated ... "As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces," he said. "But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make." I have always been one of those who feel that history is shaped as much by people as by impersonal forces. That's why I liked being a journalist, and that's why I became a biographer. As a result, the pieces in this collection are about people -- how their minds work, what makes them creative, how they rippled the surface of history.
For many years I worked at Time magazine, whose cofounder, Henry Luce, had a simple injunction: Tell the history of our time through the people who make it. He almost always put a person (rather than a topic or an event) on the cover, a practice I tried to follow when I became editor. I would do so even more religiously if I had it to do over again. When highbrow critics accused Time of practicing personality journalism, Luce replied that Time did not invent the genre, the Bible did. That's the way we have always conveyed lessons, values, and history: through the tales of people.
In particular, I have been interested in creative people. By creative people I don't mean those who are merely smart. As a journalist, I discovered that there are a lot of smart people in this world. Indeed, they are a dime a dozen, and often they don't amount to much. What makes someone special is imagination or creativity, the ability to make a mental leap and see things differently. In 1905, for example, the most knowledgeable physicists of Europe were trying to explain why a light wave always appeared to travel at the same speed no matter how fast you were moving relative to it. It took a third-class patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, to make the creative leap, based only on thought experiments he imagined in his head. The speed of light remains constant, he said, but time varies depending on your state of motion. As Albert Einstein later noted, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
The first real writer I ever met was Walker Percy, the Louisiana novelist whose wry philosophical depth and lightly worn grace still awe me when I revisit my well-thumbed copies of The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman. He lived on the Bogue Falaya, a bayou-like, lazy river across Lake Pontchartrain from my hometown of New Orleans. My friend Thomas was his nephew, and thus he became "Uncle Walker" to all of us kids who used to go up there to fish, capture sunning turtles, water-ski, and flirt with his daughter Ann. It was not quite clear what Uncle Walker did. He had trained as a doctor, but he never practiced. Instead, he worked at home all day. Ann said he was a writer, but it was not until after his first novel, The Moviegoer, gained recognition that it dawned on me that writing was something you could do for a living, just like being a doctor or a fisherman or an engineer.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
A variety of American (mostly) politicians, scientists and journalists past and present are the subjects of American Sketches, a gallery of quick portraits written over the past several decades by journalist, biographer and former Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson.
Political leaders take center stage as Isaacson, who wrote an autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, muses on Franklin and the other Founders in a few short essays written for Newsweek, Time and The New York Times. Another section consists of pieces on various “Statecrafters” ranging from former National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, an architect under Kennedy and Johnson of the Vietnam War; to Henry Kissinger, whose realistic approach to diplomacy Isaacson assesses and reassesses in a series of essays, including a review of Kissinger’s 1994 tome, Diplomacy. And Isaacson’s thoughts on the difference between consensus builders and those who defy conventional thinking inform his 2004 New York Times Op-Ed defense of Colin Powell, whose mistaken belief in flawed intelligence led to the Iraq War, as well as Isaacson’s look at former CIA Director George Tenet, whose agency supplied that flawed intelligence in the first place.
Isaacson’s fascination with the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev is explored in several essays, while his thoughts on Bill and Hillary Clinton are revealed in pieces on both their memoirs. And a section on journalism includes a piece on Time cofounder Henry Luce, eulogies for former Time editor Henry Grunwald and former Newsweek editor Maynard Parker, and a remembrance of writer George Plimpton.
Isaacson has also written a biography of Einstein, and a section on the man who first told us that E = mc² includes an excerpt from that biography that examines Einstein’s religious beliefs, and essays that explore the connection between Einstein’s rebelliousness and his creativity, the extent of his involvement with the development of the atomic bomb, and his dogged pursuit of a unified field theory.
And Isaacson also includes a striking “Interlude”: his 1992 interview with Woody Allen, done in the midst of the furor over the revelation that Allen was dating Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his estranged girlfriend Mia Farrow.
American Sketches begins with a long autobiographical introduction in which Isaacson muses on his writer’s vocation, and concludes with a loving tribute to his hometown of New Orleans, the setting for his upcoming book on Louis Armstrong. The result is a celebration of the creativity, imagination and genius of some truly extraordinary individuals that ultimately becomes Isaacson’s tribute to the power of journalism to bring us all in touch with our shared humanity.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster ( November 24, 2009 )
Item #: 57-4856
ISBN: 9781439180648
Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 0.76 inches
Product Weight: 18.0 ounces
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