Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

Our 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.

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.

[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.

A brazen book, one that buttonholes the reader…in just the way that its subject did… So perfectly has Packer captured his [Holbrooke’s] style that there is no sense of discontinuity when the subject himself takes over as author… Enthralling… Our Man is unputdownable.

Brilliant reporting… brave and intellectually honest… This is the kind of biography (massive, detailed) by the kind of author (respected, experienced) reserved for great books on great men.

Packer’s portrait is so full because he… [is] a first-rate reporter and writer who understands the history of the big conflicts at the centre of his story: Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan… A vivid biography.

The story has been told many times… but it has never been told as George Packer tells it… Our Man is a nuanced portrait of a driven man whose brilliance was held back by his almost comical insecurities… Packer is an accomplished reporter and careful writer, and he manages to sketch out the three conflicts at the heart of Holbrooke’s career – Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan – with subtlety and texture.

A brilliant, abrasive diplomat struggles to resolve foreign conflicts while fighting bureaucratic wars at home in this scintillating biography… Packer makes him a Shakespearean character—egomaniacal, devious, sloppy enough to make presidents deny him the prize of becoming secretary of state, yet charismatic and inspiring—in a larger-than-life portrait brimming with vivid novelistic impressions… In Holbrooke’s thwarted ambitions, Packer finds both a riveting tale of diplomatic adventure—part high drama, part low pettiness—and a captivating metaphor for America’s waning power.

By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself.

The riveting life of a deeply flawed diplomat whose chief shortcoming seems to have been the need to be more recognized than he was... Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of character and events.

It is impossible to read George Packer’s new biography of Richard Holbrooke without a piercing sense of melancholy, not only that a man so supremely alive should be dead, but also because such people — Our Man, in Packer’s title, the incarnation of vanished glory, imperial hubris, exceptional Americanism — no longer walk the earth… Extraordinary.

Stunning... If you’re one of the dozens of people running for president, the book is probably the best guide you can find to navigating a transitional moment in American leadership and foreign policy. For the rest of us, it’s a gripping read, and a sad one.

Through a depiction that may be likened to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Packer analyzes the forces of character that led us from a commitment to unity to the chaotic division in which we find ourselves today.

The Observer’s "16 Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2019"

Best appreciated like a novel, consumed whole… charming, brilliant, cocksure.

Like Holbrooke, Packer’s account barrels along, brimming with mischief, verve and a sense of history. Unlike Holbrooke, it is tender and self-aware.

Our Man… [is] a fascinating examination of the (few) successes and (many) failures of US foreign policy over the last fifty years.

[Our Man is] heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time

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

Thirty Years of American Decline

The Unwinding

George Packer's 2013 masterful portrait of a superpower coming apart at the seams - the book that gave voice and perspective to the discontent that would enfranchise Donald Trump

Packer's is an American voice of exceptional clarity and humanity in a tradition of reportage that renders the quotidian extraordinary. When our descendants survey the ruins of this modern imperium and sift its cultural detritus, American voices like this will be the tiny treasures that endure.

The historic scope of Packer's book - from the late-Seventies economic downturn right up to the recent Occupy Wall Street protests - is as impressive as its immense ambition and its cumulative narrative power... A Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks us...that daunting, unsettling question: do we truly like the world we have made for ourselves?

Epic, sad and unsettling history of the last four decades in the US... It is a testament to Packer's talents that The Unwinding is powerful, rather than off-puttingly earnest or just depressing, and that it lingers so long after reading. The sense of loneliness - of isolated souls, failed by their institutions, pummelled by the forces of big money - seems to seep under your skin, and to stay there.

Packer is among the best non-fiction writers in America... In its sensibility, The Unwinding is closer to a novel than a work of fiction. It is all the more powerful for it.

Original, incisive, courageous, and essential. One of the best works of non-fiction I've read in years

Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

A tour de force... A fascinating journey through an America that has largely remained hidden from view. There are echoes of Don DeLillo's Underworld in the scope of Packer's vision and his deft eye for language and detail

Hums - with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America's increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery... Close to a non-fiction masterpiece

A precise, complex but delicately wrought tapestry, both funny and wistfully sad and always rich in observational detail... [An] angry, wise and moving state-of-the-union address

*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION* 
 
‘A Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks…do we truly like the world we have made for ourselves?’ The Times 
 
America is in crisis. 
 
In the space of a generation the country has become divided between winners and losers, with its political system on the verge of breakdown and its people adrift amongst failing institutions. 
 
In The Unwinding, George Packer tells the human story of America’s vertiginous collapse. Dean Price is a sustainability evangelist in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker trying to survive the collapse of the Rust Belt; Jeff Connaughton, a political careerist in Washington, and Peter Thiel, a controversial Silicon Valley billionaire. Journeying across three decades, Packer weaves the stories of these four Americans together to paint a rich, complex and compelling portrait of contemporary America as it stands at this, its most pivotal moment. 
 
 
‘Hums - with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion... Close to a non-fiction masterpiece’ The New York Times

George Packer

In the great tradition of Richard Hofstadter, but with a reporter's eye, George Packer has given us a thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book about crisis and opportunity.

Jon Meacham, author of His Truth Is Marching On and The Soul of America

George Packer has written a small but big book. The end of the pandemic should be pure joy, but the fact that a public health crisis deepened our divisions has weighed down our hearts. Is there anything that could glue us together as one people? Packer answers yes. And the case he makes in doing so provides the vaccine I have most wanted - hope.

Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto

In Last Best Hope, George Packer retells the story of 2020, offering an original account of the fracturing of [America's] mind and suggesting how we might restore unity. Ranging from Tocqueville to Trump, this extended essay will provoke you to think harder about America's past as well as America's future.

Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy and Gulag

In the summer of 2020, America seemed to divide into two different nations. Anyone who observed the crack-up will cherish this flinty analysis, which offers new insights into how Americans from Frances Perkins to Bayard Rustin to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol have understood and defined freedom. The result is a clear-eyed explanation of how a progressive nation can be a unified one.

John H. McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, contributing editor at The Atlantic, and host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley

[An] incisive, deftly argued book.

America in Crisis and Renewal

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming injustices, paralyses, and divides 
 
 How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities-feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end. 
 
 Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. 
 
 At a time when many fear that the American experiment in self-government may collapse, or, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "die by suicide", Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain American democracy. To point a better way forward, he looks back at previous eras of crisis to discover the resources for invigorating self-government. Combining trenchant social analysis with a vibrant and stinging essayistic voice and a deep knowledge of America's past and present, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national self-examination the times demand.

George Packer

Praise for Last Best Hope

In the great tradition of Richard Hofstadter, but with a reporter's eye, George Packer has given us a thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book about crisis and opportunity.

George Packer has written a small but big book. The end of the pandemic should be pure joy, but the fact that a public health crisis deepened our divisions has weighed down our hearts. Is there anything th ...

In Last Best Hope, George Packer retells the story of 2020, offering an original account of the fracturing of [America's] mind and suggesting how we might restore unity. Ranging from Tocqueville to Trump, ...

In the great tradition of Richard Hofstadter, but with a reporter's eye, George Packer has given us a thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book about crisis and opportunity.

George Packer has written a small but big book. The end of the pandemic should be pure joy, but the fact that a public health crisis deepened our divisions has weighed down our hearts. Is there anything th ...

In Last Best Hope, George Packer retells the story of 2020, offering an original account of the fracturing of [America's] mind and suggesting how we might restore unity. Ranging from Tocqueville to Trump, ...

In the great tradition of Richard Hofstadter, but with a reporter's eye, George Packer has given us a thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book about crisis and opportunity.

George Packer has written a small but big book. The end of the pandemic should be pure joy, but the fact that a public health crisis deepened our divisions has weighed down our hearts. Is there anything th ...

In Last Best Hope, George Packer retells the story of 2020, offering an original account of the fracturing of [America's] mind and suggesting how we might restore unity. Ranging from Tocqueville to Trump, ...

Books by George Packer

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