Our Man Richard Holbrooke And The End Of The American Century

Author: George Packer

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General Fields

  • : $50.00 AUD
  • : 9781910702925
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Jonathan Cape
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  • : 1.018
  • : April 2019
  • : 4 Centimeters X 16.3 Centimeters X 23.9 Centimeters
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  • : 49.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : George Packer
  • :
  • : Hardback
  • : 1905
  • :
  • : English
  • : 973.929092
  • : 480
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Barcode 9781910702925
9781910702925

Description

GERALDINE BROOKS:


"The diplomat Richard Holbrooke isn’t a household name in Australia, nor in the US for that matter.  So why read this hefty tome?   First, because of Packer’s stunningly original style, which redefines and resets the bar for the genre of biography--“Caro on crack,” as one Amazon reader put it.  And second because Holbrooke’s career encompassed some of the thorniest  foreign policy predicaments, from the feckless tragedy of Vietnam to the ambivalent cross-currents of the Obama White House, and the book provides an elegant and account of how diplomacy works, and why it so often doesn’t."


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.