Description
Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize
“Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory…Each a sweeping diplomatic historical past and a Shakespearean tragicomedy… If it’s good to learn one E-book to understand American’s overseas coverage and its quixotic forays into quicksands during the last 50 years, this will likely be it.”–Walter Isaacson, The New York Instances E-book Review
“By way of the top of the second one web page, possibly the 3rd, you are going to be hooked…There by no means was once a diplomat-activist relatively like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a E-book relatively like this — sweeping and nostalgic, beguiling and brutal, catty and important, similar to the person himself.”–David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe
Richard Holbrooke was once sensible, completely self-absorbed, and possessed of just about inhuman energy and appetites. Well known and detested, he was once the power at the back of the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, The us’s biggest diplomatic fulfillment within the put up-Chilly Warfare generation. His energy lay in an utter trust in himself and his thought of a muscular, beneficiant overseas coverage. From his days as a tender adviser in Vietnam to his final efforts to finish the Warfare in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead at the world degree. However his sharp elbows and tireless self-promoting ensured that he by no means rose to the easiest ranges in govt that he so desperately coveted. His tale is therefore the tale of The us all through its generation of supremacy: its {strength|energy|potential}, power, and experience of chance, in addition to its penchant for overreach and heedless self-trust. In Our Guy, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we’re given a nonfiction narrative that may be Each intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this peculiar and deeply improper Guy and the elite spheres of society and govt he inhabited.
