In addition to its coverage of the week's news, TIME in recent years has been giving its readers a bonus: excerpts from major books of international consequences--the memoirs of Anwar Sadat and Theodore H. White, a study of Chiang Ching (Mme. Mao Tse-tung). But never before has TIME offered an excerpt comparable in importance or scope to the one that will run in three parts beginning next week: Henry Kissinger's long awaited memoirs. TIME'S readers will be the first in the U.S. to receive a serialization of the book.

White House Years covers the period from Kissinger's summons to the White House as Richard Nixon's Assistant for National Security Affairs after the November 1968 election to the signing of the Viet Nam peace treaty in January 1973. A second volume, now being written, will recount the period to January 1977, during most of which Kissinger was Secretary of State. Of all the memoirs that have issued from public figures in the past decade, none can match this one, with its description of how foreign policy was made and diplomacy carried out in this supersonic age.

By almost any measure, White House Years is a big book. Thirty months in the writing, it runs 1,521 pages, close to three-quarters of a million words. Little, Brown, the Time Inc. subsidiary that owns North American rights to the book, plans a publication date of Oct. 23 and a first edition of 225,000 copies, an exceptionally large number. The price: $22.50.

White House Years has stirred extraordinary worldwide interest. In serialization or book form, it will appear in 17 languages* besides English. Eventually, hundreds of foreign publications will carry excerpts. There will be French and English versions in Canada, and Chinese versions not only in Taipei and Hong Kong, but also in San Francisco.

TIME'S excerpts will describe the end of America's involvement in Viet Nam and the beginning of its relations with the Communist government in China; how the U.S. groped toward deetente with the Soviet Union and coped with crises in the Middle East, Cuba and the Indian subcontinent. We will also present a gallery of famous figures as limned by Kissinger, his insights into the statesman's craft and the philosophy that underpins his entire approach to foreign policy.

White House Years will obviously be required reading for all serious students of modern foreign affairs. We are confident TIME'S readers will find it a compelling--and certainly controversial--account of a turbulent era in U.S. history.

*Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

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