Our Man
RICHARD HOLBROOKE AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, The New York 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. 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.
Currently a staff writer with The Atlantic, and formerly a staff writer at The New Yorker, George 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. Following up his National Book Award win for The Unwinding, Packer will publish Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. His talks draw on a vast and varied knowledge of America throughtout 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 infrastructre 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.