*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography**Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for
Biography**Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize*Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and
exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean
tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its
quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years this would be it.--Walter Isaacson The
New York Times Book ReviewBy the end of the second page maybe the third you will be
hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke] and there seldom has been
a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental beguiling and brutal catty and critical
much like the man himself.--David M. Shribman The Boston GlobeRichard Holbrooke was brilliant
utterly self-absorbed and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and
detested 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. 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. But his sharp elbows and tireless
self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so
desperately coveted. His story is thus the story 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. In Our Man drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers we are given a
nonfiction narrative that 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.
