Great teachers are often subversive – breaking the furniture that forms their students’ assumptions, provoking them, challenging them, flirting intellectually, and, occasionally, not only intellectually. It’s certainly no accident that the fraught relationship between a charismatic teacher and promising student is a recurring dramatic theme in all media. It usually works.

In “The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill” (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pages, $25), Molly Worthen has taken the familiar one step further by writing a strangely passionate biography of the teacher at Yale who inspired her as an undergraduate to write in her notebook that “Charles Hill is God.” At the outset, deification may not appear to be a promising development in the production of an objective biography. It is a measure of Ms. Worthen’s tenacity as a reporter and critic that Mr. Hill emerges from these pages as a deeply flawed human being that you might care to know on a professional basis, but something of a burnt-out case at the deepest personal level.

If Mr. Hill – who is still teaching his famous Grand Strategy course in New Haven in collaboration with historians Paul Kennedy and John Gaddis – is nearly as acute as Ms.Worthen believes, he may be more than a little disquieted by what his admirer has wrought. It’s an odd book on several counts, but never more so than when Ms. Worthen attempts to make sense of Mr. Hill’s apparent social isolation. He admits to having no real friends. He is embarrassed by any kind of small talk. He would have starved and/or been naked if the women in his life hadn’t saw to it. He has trouble smiling and he scares people. Moreover, his gifts as a husband and father are decidedly in question.

Where Mr. Hill clearly does excel is in promoting his somewhat obsessive theories on how good foreign policy, or, as he would put it, statecraft, works. As a career foreign officer who worked closely for Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, he has earned a right to his opinions. And they are usually correct, especially with regard to the conduct of the Cold War, the unnecessary tragedy of Vietnam, the Middle East, and the rise and threat of militant Islam. For a man who spent most of his professional life at the State Department, he is remarkably free of Arabist nonsense, and, if Ms. Worthen is correct, he even had a major hand in turning Mr. Shultz into a pro-Israel hawk.

In Ms. Worthen’s Biography, Mr. Hill is quoted as summarizing our current situation thus:

If the (radical) Islamists can defeat the Middle Eastern states that seek to reform and work with the international system, we will be faced with another world war. Like the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the free world, this will be a war launched by a revolutionary ideology that aims to undermine and destroy the international state system and to replace it with one of (their) own.

This is succinct and accurate. The system militant Islamists want is a revival of a caliphate that would make the Dark Ages look like a Renaissance and would usher in a “rule of law” that is both discriminatory and brutish.And while it may be amusing to imagine Mr. Hill wailing away at these miscreants in Yale’s leftish precincts, his passionate concern is well-founded and no joke. The author notes that colleague Paul Kennedy, a well-known liberal, frequently is observed wincing at Mr. Hill’s pronouncements in class. This alone suggests that all Mr.Hill’s personal faults should be forgiven instantly and forgotten.

There is a Zelig-like quality to Mr. Hill’s career that contributes to the oddness of the book. Like Woody Allen’s mythical character, Mr. Hill keeps showing up at propitious times in the right places. He is ringside as a China-watcher in Hong Kong for the Cultural Revolution. He is on leave at Harvard for the student riots in 1969. He is in Saigon just before the collapse. He goes to Reykjavik with President Reagan. He is one of the last men standing in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal. (Ms. Worthen concludes that he withheld incriminating documents from prosecutors.) In every instance, he walked in the shadow of a powerful boss, whispering metaphorically and influentially into his ear.

Although capable of graceful writing, Ms. Worthen occasionally displays too keen an awareness of her former status as a privileged and credentialed Yalie. Still, she’s enough of a contrarian to distance herself clearly from the university’s more screwball obsessions with class, gender, and Halliburton.

You don’t find many books written by someone in her 20s with a passage as generous to the past as this:

For those too young to remember the early Cold War, it is impossible to comprehend the anxieties of those years: both the physical insecurity of the nuclear age and the intellectual peril that Western thinkers saw in the rise of Communism. As Whittaker Chambers wrote in “Witness,” his memoir of his time as a Soviet spy and testimony in the Alger Hiss espionage trial, ‘Few men are so dull that they do not knows that the crisis exists and that it threatens their lives at every point. It is popular to call it a social crisis. It is in fact a total crisis – religious, moral, intellectual, social, political, economic. It is popular to call it a crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a crisis of the whole world.’ For Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s … the anxiety was pervasive. … Hill was drawn to government service as a young man of faith might be drawn to serve his church as a missionary abroad.

Ms. Worthen has taken what looks like the accurate measure of her eccentric mentor, and the result is an oddly touching and rewarding read.

Mr. Willcox last wrote for these pages on Philip Jenkins’s latest book.