Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century - Hardcover

Packer, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1910702927 ISBN 13: 9781910702925

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2019

Synopsis

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.

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.

About this title

Review

"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)

"Rarely in recent years has a work of non-fiction so clearly, ruthlessly, compassionately shown such a prominent person’s life from the inside out. It is a masterwork about diplomacy, government and the world." (Anand Giridharadas Guardian, *Books of the Year*)

"Holbrooke in all his capacious brilliance and arrogance has been captured by George Packer... [Our Man] is, I strongly feel, a classic." (Washington Post)

"Outstanding... Our Man is one of the most fascinating dissections of US power – its strengths and serious weaknesses – I’ve read." (The Guardian)

"Packer is one of the most talented non-fiction writers in the US. In his hands, a biography of a diplomat who never quite made it to the top becomes a history of modern America’s entanglement with the world." (Gideon Rachman Financial Times, *Books of the Year*)

"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." (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." (The Times)

"Dazzling... an exploration of American decline that’s heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time... Packer marshals a huge amount of material with great aplomb... His prose fizzes with almost Holbrookian levels of energy." (Telegraph)

"Deeply researched, compelling... Our Man is not just a portrait of a fascinating historical figure, it is a contemplation of a half century of US foreign and security policy and its most intractable challenges." (Observer)

"[Packer] is such a masterful narrator – and Holbrooke such a vexing subject to portray – that this story is both gripping and surprisingly pacey, its wheels greased by revealing excerpts from Holbrooke's personal letters and the private reflections he recorded to tape. Added to this is Packer's arresting thesis: that his brash but erudite and driven subject symbolises something about America's engagement with the world following the Second World War that will never be recovered after Trump." (New Statesman)

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1910702927
• ISBN 13: 9781910702925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 608