Our Man

Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

George Packer

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English

Vintage
09 April 2020

Biography: historical, political & military; History; General & world history; History of the Americas

From one of America's greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man.

From one of America's greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man.
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*WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2019
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*FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2020
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Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. He was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted.

Holbrooke's story is the story of the rise and fall of America during its era of supremacy- its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. Drawing on Holbrooke's diaries and papers, George Packer's narrative is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man, and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

A GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

By: George Packer
Imprint: Vintage
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 37mm
Weight: 426g
ISBN: 9781784704216
ISBN 10: 1784704210
Pages: 608
Publication Date: 09 April 2020
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of The Unwinding- Thirty Years of American Decline, which was a New York Times bestseller and won a National Book Award. His other nonfiction books include The Assassins' Gate- America in Iraq, and Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; and two novels, The Half Man and Central Square. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews for Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory... Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography... If you could read only one book to comprehend America's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it. -- Walter Isaacson * New York Times * Outstanding... Our Man is one of the most fascinating dissections of US power - its strengths and serious weaknesses - I've read. -- Steve Bloomfield * The Guardian * Holbrooke in all his capacious brilliance and arrogance has been captured by George Packer... [Our Man] is, I strongly feel, a classic. -- Richard Cohen * Washington Post * You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none... A fascinating and compulsive read. -- Jonathan Powell * Spectator * Our Man is a great, exuberant read, gossipy and thoughtful, about a remarkable American diplomat who tried to place himself at the heart of some of the bloodiest, most intractable wars of our age: Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan... Packer displays his talents as a master of narrative reconstruction. -- Roger Boyes * The Times *