Our Man
Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
No one understands the diverse, vibrant, and conflicted American tapestry quite like George Packer. A sterling journalist and National Book Award-winning author, Packer’s New York Times bestselling book, The Unwinding, and now Our Man, offer sweeping analyses of America through the lens of political figures and landmark historical moments. “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,” says Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson in his glowing New York Times Book Review cover story. Packer’s gripping keynotes are no different.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the Times chose George Packer’s The Unwinding as a key book “To Help You Understand Trump’s Win.” Now, years after this flash point, Packer’s notion of ‘unwinding’—the rise of populism, institutional collapse, and the unraveling of the American Dream—is more bracingly relevant than ever. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century—being hailed as a complex depiction of a nation in global crisis—is a vividly told saga of the ambition, idealism, and hubris of Richard Holbrooke, one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. The Times says that “Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.” In talks drawn from his lucid yet optimistic reporting, Packer offers a deeply informative perspective for anyone seeking to comprehend the political and cultural forces making the country what it is today—and how it affects us in ways we could never have predicted.
Currently a staff writer with The Atlantic, and formerly a staff writer at The New Yorker, Packer’s National Book Award-winning The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, was called “a gripping narrative survey of contemporary America” by The New York Times Book Review, and a “professional work of journalism that also happens to be more intimate and textured—and certainly more ambitious—than most contemporary works of U.S. fiction dare to be” by The Los Angeles Times. Packer’s talks draw on a vast and varied knowledge of America throughout history, showing why things happened the way they did, and what we can all do to help create a more equitable nation when so much infrastructure and fair guidance is lacking.
Packer has published four other works of non-fiction: The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq; Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade; Blood of the Liberals; and The Village of Waiting. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and a play, Betrayed. He is the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, and of a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.