New look at complex Kissinger-Nixon nexus

Sir Alistair Horne was born in 1925, two years after Henry Kissinger, but like his great contemporary, he shows no signs of slowing down. In the past decade, he has written four books on his beloved France. Now, in Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year (Simon & Schuster), his 25th book over all, he ventures into different territory.

This authorized portrait offers a comprehensive, penetrating and mostly reliable chronicle that its subject should welcome.

Kissinger has always been acutely sensitive to criticism, and he miscalculated by providing Walter Isaacson full access for a 1992 biography, which was supposed to counterbalance Seymour Hersh's withering 1983 account, The Price of Power. It didn't. Then came Christopher Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).