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*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography**Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography**Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize*"Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review"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."--David M. Shribman, The Boston GlobeRichard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, 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. 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. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story 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. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that 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.
If you happen to be a friend who trusts my advice, be certain to enjoy the pleasures from devouring Our Man. You’ll receive immense satisfaction on many levels. If you don’t know me, I offer you three ways to build your own conviction this book is one you’ve been searching for.The most resounding endorsement I’ve read in the Sunday New York Times Book Review in years appeared in its cover story of last May 6th, written by none other than Walter Isaacson. I won’t summarize, just quote a few lines of his unqualified enthusiasm: ‘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.’And what about the caliber of the storytelling? ‘The result is so bracing that Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.’ And is there a Shakespeare-worthy leading character? Holbrooke is, writes Isaacson, ‘the last great freewheeling diplomat of the American Century. I doubt that any novel, not even one co-written by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. But now one has.’I revisited Isaacson’s review after savoring George Packer’s tale through its final page. And thought if you ever find yourself teaching a class in book review writing, simply hand out this exemplar to those so interested and say no more. Be sure to enjoy this fully rounded review for its craft as well as its insights into this amazing work.Would you like a second professional opinion? Turn to the New York Review of Books feature article by Thomas Powers of last June 6th. As a long-time subscriber, I can’t remember another matching this unbridled endorsement. ‘No book could achieve the intensity, completeness, and narrative depth of Our Man without the author’s belief he had been put on this earth to do it. The strength of the book is its focus on Holbrooke’s character, which Packer pursues much as James Boswell pursued the human truth of Samuel Johnson.’And what about the richness of its sub-stories? ‘Packer’s hundred pages on the American failure in Vietnam tell the story as forcefully as any hundred pages ever written about the war.’Third, here’s a frugal tasting-offer to tempt your palate. Just read Packer’s preface. Seven pages and you will have dived into a clear, cool pool on a hot summer day. You will immediately sense the writing, its intimacy, the characters, the story, its bewilderment, the sense of many wrenching plots about to unfold. In this short a space your own sensors for full engagement are likely to arouse and be ready to go.If so, best regards from Isaacson, Powers and Moloney for encouraging you into George Packer’s masterpiece; which in a fair world should win recognition in every eligible category. Most important, the category of your own enjoyment and fulfillment in living through these formidable times.Thomas W. Moloney
