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Luce had access to Brzezinski's previously sealed personal diaries, and it shows: this is the first biography to render Brzezinski as both the strategist who correctly bet on Soviet collapse decades early and as a specific, difficult person, competitive to a fault, notoriously tight with money, capable of real tenderness with his family alongside a coldly instrumental view of geopolitics. Luce doesn't flatten the contradictions; he's explicit about Brzezinski's intellectual arrogance and the ruthlessness that alienated colleagues even as he reshaped Carter-era foreign policy. The book works as both a character study and an argument that Brzezinski's Cold War instincts, forged as a Polish emigre who never treated Soviet power as permanent, deserve more credit than the Kissinger-dominated histories of the era have given him.