In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, by Francis Fukuyama, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $29
In his thirties, Francis Fukuyama was pursuing a respectable but low-key career as a RAND Corporation analyst and State Department bureaucrat focused on the Soviet Union. His breakthrough into the public sphere came in the summer of 1989, when his essay "The End of History?" appeared in The National Interest.
