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At nearly 800 pages, No Higher Honor is not a book that invites casual reading. It is a dense, granular, and often exhausting account of eight years at the very centre of American power - first as National Security Advisor, then as Secretary of State - during some of the most consequential and divisive years in modern US foreign policy. It knocks you in the head as you dive into it and feel the massive responsibilities of the roles Rice held.

The book's greatest strength is its sheer proximity to the machinery of decision-making. The fascination lies less in the broad vision put forth for a more democratic world than in the gritty description of the way decisions were made in the White House and the State Department as the Bush Administration adapted to a world radically altered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Rice takes the reader into negotiating rooms where the fates of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon were being decided, and she pulls back the curtain on near-catastrophic escalations between Pakistan and India, and Russia and Georgia. The memoir draws comparisons with Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation, both in form and substance - both authors served as Secretary of State in administrations criticised for going to war as a result of policy errors.

Rice is surprisingly candid in her assessments of colleagues. There are engaging accounts of internal struggles in the Bush White House, including her run-ins with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and noteworthy critiques of John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz. She does not spare fellow Republicans, which lends the book a credibility that pure self-justification would have undermined. Her portraits of foreign leaders are sharp and occasionally withering - some emerge as serious interlocutors, others less flatteringly.

Where the book falters is in its length and its occasional tendency toward the very revisionism it seems keen to avoid. The most disturbing feature of retrospectives like this is self-serving spin that retroactively whitewashes past decisions, and while Rice largely resists this temptation, the book's relentless granularity can feel like a defence strategy in itself - burying difficult questions beneath an avalanche of procedural detail. Some passages read more like diplomatic cables than narrative prose, and the unrelenting density will test even the most committed reader of political memoir.

That said, even those who disagree with several of the administration's actions will find that the policy views presented were thought out and valid, even when they were ultimately wrong. One does not have to agree with someone to appreciate what they have to say, and Rice tells a powerful story about her eight years of experience. Her account of the immediate aftermath of September 11, seen from inside the White House, is both vivid and unsettling, adding real texture to the well-documented history of those days.

Rice's rigorous and fair-minded accounting will likely help soften the historical verdict on the Bush years, even if a full rehabilitation remains unlikely. She was one of the few principals whose reputation stood higher in 2008 than in 2000, and this memoir goes some way toward explaining why. The professionalism and clarity on display are unmistakable - even when the conclusions they led to remain fiercely contested.

No Higher Honor is not a book for everyone. It demands patience, a tolerance for procedural detail, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. But for those interested in the reality of how foreign policy is made - how the sausage gets made, in all its unglamorous complexity - it is among the most comprehensive insider accounts of the Bush era available.