BLUE SKIES

Starr, an academic and expert on Russia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, offers a memoir of an eventful life that’s taken him all over the world.

The author, who advised three U.S. presidents and founded the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, starts with his boyhood in the Pleasant Ridge suburb of Cincinnati, where he grew up in the wake of World War II with his parents and three siblings; even now, in his 80s, he still has the ration book that was issued in his name back in 1943. He left Cincinnati at age 18 and embarked on a life of travel and study, visiting Europe and particularly Russia at the height of Soviet bureaucracy, which brought him to the attention of famed Kremlinologist George Kennan at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Starr later left Princeton University, where he was an assistant professor teaching Russian history and European intellectual history, to help found the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. Alongside his professional and political memories, he recounts his family life with his wife, Christina, and his children, but the main focus of the narrative is his work as vice president of Tulane University, the president of Oberlin College, and a trustee at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Starr’s narrative is pleasingly casual in its erudition, making casual allusions to the work of Günter Grass, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Albert Camus, and Claude Lévi-Strauss; the author named his dog Puccini. He’s consistently eloquent and self-effacing, and his observations about the many historical figures he’s met are pricelessly candid, whether it’s former Soviet minister Vyacheslav Molotov (who, the author says, “epitomized evil”) or President Jimmy Carter (“a bright and engaging man in a hurry”). The book’s most arresting portrait by far, though, is that of Kennan, who often napped on Starr’s office couch when he visited the nation’s capital.

An intelligent and thoroughly engaging account set in the footnotes of 20th-century world history.