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

About the Book

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.

**WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2019**
**FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2020**

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

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, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, which won the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He has also written two novels, The Half Man and Central Square. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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. 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. Holbrooke in all his capacious brilliance and arrogance has been captured by George Packer… [Our Man] is, I strongly feel, a classic. Outstanding... Our Man is one of the most fascinating dissections of US power – its strengths and serious weaknesses – I’ve read. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. George Packer [is] arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation… Our Man may be the most vivid tour of America’s foreign delusions that has been offered since the Vietnam War.