His Rise and Fall of The Great Powers was required reading in undergrad history and foreign relations classes.
Lots of pretty terrible books are required reading in such courses, though.
I don't think that that
particular book is terrible, but although it included some sections that were pretty good (e.g. the coverage of the fiscal-military state) it also included some sections that were pretty bad (e.g. the section on the Habsburg 'universal monarchy', and, to a lesser extent, the part on the runup to the First World War).
Kennedy's clearly not a pop-historian and has produced legit work in a lot of areas, especially on British military and diplomatic policy in the Victorian/Edwardian/Georgian eras. One of the key aspects of his work, though, is that in my view it has tended to be, well, very British.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, although it did discuss other European states, and later the US, Japan, and China, was very much written from the perspective of somebody who viewed almost the entire period under discussion from London. His work on the Anglo-German rivalry immediately before WWI, although very good, again was framed in the terms that British parliamentarians and pundits and later historians saw the issue in, not in anybody else's.
There's a very perceptible skew to a lot of Kennedy's writing, and it's reduced the value of his analysis, in my opinion.
