SOURCE: "Keeping the Faith," in New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992, pp. 3-4.

In the following review, Kennan offers favorable assessment of Summer Meditations, praising Havel's courage to "offer to the public so unsparingly an exposure of what one can only call his political and personal philosophy."

Václav Havel, the courageous leading dissident in the years of Communist control of Czechoslovakia, and more recently president of that country, needs no introduction to the readers of The New York Review. His name has appeared on the pages of the Review in a number of capacities. Known originally primarily as a playwright, Havel has always been a prolific and engaging writer. His literary output in later years has taken exclusively the form of essays, letters, and unpublished interviews; and after his release from prison in 1983, several volumes of English translations of such materials saw publication, prior to the appearances...