George Packer traces Richard Holbrooke’s career from Vietnam through the Balkans to Afghanistan, using one diplomat’s ambition and contradictions to examine America’s place in the world.
The biography invites a discussion about the distance between public purpose and personal ambition: when force of personality makes diplomacy possible, and when it narrows a nation’s understanding of its own power.
Reading context: Elliot Ackerman named this book among his current reading in a July 2019 American Writers Museum interview.
Featured edition: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, Vintage paperback, May 26, 2020; 624 pages; ISBN 9780307948175. This paperback edition appeared after the interview.
