Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The American Scholar

    The Difficult Diplomat

    Jun 03, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Charles Trueheart

    OUR MAN: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

    BY GEORGE PACKER

    Knopf, 592 pp., $30

    RICHARD HOLBROOKE DIED nearly a decade ago, not yet 70, having charged through American diplomacy for nearly 50 years on a manic quest for self-realization. He wore his ambitions so nakedly and bore his many disappointments so bitterly that his occasional triumphs, notably in drawing a shaky but durable peace from a genocidal war in Bosnia, can be obscured.

    In his supercharged new biography, George Packer doesn’t lose sight of Holbrooke’s spasms of near greatness, or of the high ideals that were in symbiosis with his oily machinations. Yet the cascade of often awkwardly intimate details—many of them in Holbrooke’s own words—can’t help but make him

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The American Scholar

    The American Scholar4 min read
    Commonplace Book
    To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with
    The American Scholar4 min read
    We've Gone Mainstream
    Marie Arana’s sprawling portrait of Latinos in the United States is rich and nuanced in its depiction of the diversity of “the least understood minority.” Yet LatinoLand is regrettably old-fashioned and out-of-date. For starters, Hispanics aren’t rea
    The American Scholar5 min read
    Acting Out
    In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act

    Related Books & Audiobooks