 If there's one book that's often considered Kipling's masterpiece, it's the novel Kim, the story of an orphan street kid in India who ends up spying for the British Raj. It's a book about what Kipling called the great game, the secret power plays between the British and Russian empires. Long after Kipling died, Kim took on another life as a kind of manual for the U.S. architects of the Vietnam War. Here's Chris Benvey again. It's the damnedest thing.