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Synopsis
"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 Review"By 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 Globe
Richard 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.
Review
GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the 2013 National Book Award. His other nonfiction books include The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and Blood of the Liberals, winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author of two novels and a play, Betrayed, winner of the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.PrologueHolbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can't get his voice out of my head. I still hear it saying, "You haven't read that book? You really need to read it." Saying, "I feel, and I hope this doesn't sound too self-satisfied, that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are." Saying, "Gotta go, Hillary's on the line." That voice! Calm, nasal, a trace of older New York, a singsong cadence when he was being playful, but always doing something to you, cajoling, flattering, bullying, seducing, needling, analyzing, one-upping you-applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current, so that by the end of a conversation, even two minutes on the phone, you found yourself far out from where you'd started, unsure how you got there, and mysteriously exhausted.
He was six feet one but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones, on top of which sat his strangely small head and, encased within it, the sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk that, as his body wore down and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks in his leather attach� case, sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used socks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia-the place in history that he always craved, though it was never enough-with his feet planted in a Brookstone Shiatsu foot massager. One morning he showed up late for a meeting in the Secretary of State's suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt untucked and fly half-zipped, padding around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket, while Madeleine Albright's furious stare tracked his every move. During a videoconference call from the U.N. mission in New York his feet were propped up on a chair, while down in the White House Situation Room their giant distortion completely filled the wall screen and so disrupted the meeting that President Clinton's national security advisor finally ordered a military aide to turn off the video feed. Holbrooke put his feet up anywhere, in the White House, on other people's desks and coffee tables-for relief, and for advantage.
Near the end, it seemed as if all his troubles were collecting in his feet-atrial fibrillation, marital tension, thwarted ambition, conspiring colleagues, hundreds of thousands of air miles, corrupt foreign leaders, a war that would not yield to the relentless force of his will.
But at the other extreme from his feet, the ice-blue eyes were on perpetual alert. Their light told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. They captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like one-way mirrors, they looked outward, not inward. I never knew anyone quicker to size up a room, an adversary, a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation-even his own imminent death. The ceaseless appraising told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and languid limbs. Once, in the 1980s, he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and called out: "Hi, Dick." Holbrooke watched the man go by, then turned to his companion: "I wonder what he meant by that." Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb, and his suit always looked rumpled, and he couldn't stay off the phone or T.V., and he kept losing things, and he ate as much food as fast as he could, once slicing open the tip of his nose on a clamshell and bleeding through a pair of cloth napkins-yes, he was in almost every way a disorderly presence. But his eyes never lost focus.
So much thought, so little inwardness. He could not be alone-he might have had to think about himself. Maybe that was something he couldn't afford to do. Leslie Gelb, Holbrooke's friend of forty-five years and recipient of multiple daily phone calls, would butt into a monologue and ask, "What's Obama like?" Holbrooke would give a brilliant analysis of the President. "How do you think you affect Obama?" Holbrooke had nothing to say. Where did it come from, that blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life? It was a great advantage over the rest of us, because the propulsion from idea to action was never broken by self-scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability, and finally, it was fatal.
I can hear the voice saying: "It's your problem now, not mine."
He loved speed. Franz Klammer's fearless downhill run for the gold in 1976 was a feat Holbrooke never finished admiring, until you almost believed that he had been the one throwing himself into those dangerous turns at Innsbruck. He pedaled his bike straight into a swarming Saigon intersection while talking about the war to a terrified blonde journalist just arrived from Manhattan; he zipped through Paris traffic while lecturing his State Department boss on the status of the Vietnam peace talks; his Humvee careened down the dirt switchbacks of the Mount Igman road above besieged Sarajevo, chased by the armored personnel carrier with his doomed colleagues.
He loved mischief. It made him endless fun to be with and got him into unnecessary trouble. In 1967, he was standing outside Robert McNamara's office on the second floor of the Pentagon, a twenty-six-year-old junior official hoping to catch the Secretary of Defense on his way in or out, for no reason other than self-advancement. A famous colonel was waiting, too-a decorated paratrooper back from Vietnam, where Holbrooke had known him. Everything about the colonel was pressed and creased, his uniform shirt, his face, his pants carefully tucked into his boots and delicately bloused around the calves. He must have spent the whole morning on them. "That looks really beautiful," Holbrooke said, and he reached down and yanked a pants leg all the way out of its boot. The colonel started yelling. Holbrooke laughed.
Back in the Kennedy and Johnson years, when he was elbowing his way into public life, the phrase "action intellectuals" was hot, until Vietnam caught up with it and intellectuals got burned. But that was Holbrooke. Ideas mattered to him, but never for their own sake, only if they produced solutions to problems. The only problems worth his time were the biggest, hardest ones. Three fiendish wars-that's what his career came down to. He was almost singular in his eagerness to keep risking it. Having solved Bosnia, he wanted Cyprus, Kosovo, Congo, the Horn of Africa, Tibet, Iran, India, Pakistan, and finally Afghanistan. Only the Middle East couldn't tempt him. As the Washington bureaucracy got more cautious, his appetite for conquests grew. Right after his death, Hillary Clinton said, "I picture him like Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians."
He loved history-so much that he wanted to make it. The phrase "great man" now sounds anachronistic, but as an inspiration for human striving maybe we shouldn't throw out the whole idea. He came of age when there was still a place for it and that place could only be filled by an American. This was just after the war, when the ruined world lay prone and open to the visionary action of figures like Acheson, Kennan, Marshall, and Harriman. They didn't just grab for land and gold like the great men of earlier empires. They built the structures of international order that would endure for three generations, longer than anything ever lasts, and that are only now turning to rubble. These were unsentimental, supremely self-assured, white Protestant men-privileged, you could say-born around the turn of the century, who all knew one another and knew how to get things done. They didn't take a piss without a strategy. Holbrooke revered them all and adopted a few as replacement fathers. He wanted to join them at the top, and he clawed his way up the slope of an establishment that was crumbling under his crampons. He reached the highest base camp possible, but every assault on the summit failed. He loved books about mountaineers, and in his teens he climbed the Swiss Alps. He was a romantic. He never realized that he had come too late.
You will have heard that he was a monstrous egotist. It's true. It's even worse than you've heard-I'll explain as we go on. He offended countless people, and they didn't forget, and since so many of them swallowed their hurt, after he was gone it was usually the first thing out of their mouth if his name came up, as it invariably did. How he once told a colleague, "I lost more money in the market today than you make in a year." How he bumped an elderly survivor couple from the official American bus to Auschwitz on the fiftieth anniversary of its liberation, adding himself to the delegation alongside Elie Wiesel and leaving the weeping couple to beg Polish guards to let them into the camp so they wouldn't miss the ceremony. How he lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize-that kind of thing, all the time, as if he needed to discharge a surplus of self every few hours to maintain his equilibrium.
And the price he paid was very high. He destroyed his first marriage and his closest friendship. His defects of character cost him his dream job as Secretary of State, the position for which his strengths of character eminently qualified him. You can't untangle these things. I used to think that if Holbrooke could just be fixed-a dose of self-restraint, a flash of inward light-he could have done anything. But that's an illusion. We are wholly ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great.
As a member of the class of lesser beings who aspire to a good life but not a great one-who find the very notion both daunting and distasteful-I can barely fathom the agony of that "almost." Think about it: the nonstop schedule, the calculation of every dinner table, the brain that burned all day and night-and the knowledge, buried so deep he might have only sensed it as a physical ache, that he had come up short of his own impossible exaltation. I admired him for that readiness to suffer. His life was full of pleasures, but I never envied it.
We had few things in common, but one that comes to mind is a love of Conrad's novels. In one of his letters Conrad wrote that "these two contradictory instincts"-egotism and idealism-"cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism. Each alone would be fatal to our ambition." I think this means that they need each other to do any good. Idealism without egotism is feckless; egotism without idealism is destructive. It was never truer of anyone than Holbrooke. Sometimes the two instincts got out of whack. Certain people-his younger brother Andrew, for example-couldn't see his idealism for the mountain of his egotism. Andrew thought his brother was missing the section of his brain that would have made him care about anyone other than himself. But Holbrooke's friends, the handful he kept for life, absorbed the pokes and laughed off the gargantuan faults without illusion. They wanted to protect him, because his appetites and insecurities were so naked. Now and then they had to hurt him, tear him to pieces. Then they could go on loving him. They knew that, of them all, he had the most promise, and they wanted to see him fulfill it-as a way to affirm them, their generation, their idea of public service, and their country. If Holbrooke could do it, then America might still be an adventure, with great things ahead. He always wanted more, and they wanted more for him, and when he died they mourned not just their friend but the lost promise.
He loved America. Not in a chest-beating way-he didn't wear a flag pin on his lapel-but without having to try, because he was the child of parents who had given everything to become American, and he grew up after the war amid the overwhelming evidence that this was a great and generous country. In the late summer of 2010, he went with his wife-his third wife and widow, Kati-to see a revival of "South Pacific" at Lincoln Center. Lifelong friends can't remember Holbrooke ever shedding tears, but he wept at "South Pacific," and other men his age were weeping, too, and he tried to understand why. That was around the time he began speaking his thoughts into a tape recorder for some future use-maybe his memoirs-and here's what he said: "For me it was the combination of the beauty of the show and its music, and the capturing in that show of so many moments in American history, the show itself opening in New York at the height of New York's greatness, 1949, the theme-Americans at war in a distant land or islands in the South Pacific-the sense of loss of American optimism and our feeling that we could do anything. The contrast with today-" At this point his voice fails, and I find it hard to keep listening. He had only a few months to live. "-it was very powerful, and I kept thinking of where we were today, our nation, our lack of confidence in our own ability to lead compared to where we were in 1949 when it came out, evoking an era only five years or seven years earlier, when we had gone to the most distant corners of the globe and saved civilization."
I'm trying to think what to tell you, now that you have me talking. There's too much to say and it all comes crowding in at once. His ambition, his loyalty, his cruelty, his fragility, his betrayals, his wounds, his wives, his girlfriends, his sons, his lunches. By dying he stood up a hundred people, including me. He could not be alone.
If you're still interested, I can tell you what I know, from the beginning. I wasn't one of his close friends, but over the years I made a study of him. You ask why? Not because he was fascinating, though he was, and right this minute somewhere in the world fourteen people are talking about him. Now and then I might let him speak for himself-that was something he knew how to do. But I won't relate this story for his sake. No: we want to see and feel what happened to America during Holbrooke's life, and we can see and feel more clearly by following someone who was almost great, because his quest leads us deeper down the alleyways of power than the usual famous subjects (whom he knew, all of them), and his boisterous struggling lays open more human truths than the composed annals of the great. This was what Les Gelb must have meant when he said, just after his friend's death, "Far better to write a novel about Richard C. Holbrooke than a biography, let alone an obituary."
What's called the American century was really just over half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke's life. It began with the Second World War and the creative burst that followed-the United Nations, the Atlantic alliance, containment, the free world-and it went through dizzying lows and highs, until it expired the day before yesterday. The thing that brings on doom to great powers, and great men-is it simple hubris, or decadence and squander, a kind of inattention, loss of faith, or just the passage of years?-at some point that thing set in, and so we are talking about an age gone by. It wasn't a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. The best about us was inseparable from the worst. Our feeling that we could do anything gave us the Marshall Plan and Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the endless Afghan war. Our confidence and energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness-they were not so different from Holbrooke's. He was our man. That's the reason to tell you this story. That's why I can't get his voice out of my head.
Our Man
*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 Review "By 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 Globe Richard 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.
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."
Last Best Hope
Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming injustices, paralyses, and divides How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities-feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end. Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. At a time when many fear that the American experiment in self-government may collapse, or, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "die by suicide\
I wrote about Frances Perkins with the help of The Woman Behind the New Deal : The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins — Social Security , Unemployment Insurance , and the Minimum Wage, by Kristin Downey (Anchor Books, 2010); The Roosevelt I ..."
The Unwinding
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION* ‘A Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks...do we truly like the world we have made for ourselves?’ The Times America is in crisis. In the space of a generation the country has become divided between winners and losers, with its political system on the verge of breakdown and its people adrift amongst failing institutions. In The Unwinding, George Packer tells the human story of America’s vertiginous collapse. Dean Price is a sustainability evangelist in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker trying to survive the collapse of the Rust Belt; Jeff Connaughton, a political careerist in Washington, and Peter Thiel, a controversial Silicon Valley billionaire. Journeying across three decades, Packer weaves the stories of these four Americans together to paint a rich, complex and compelling portrait of contemporary America as it stands at this, its most pivotal moment. ‘Hums - with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion... Close to a non-fiction masterpiece’ The New York Times
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION* ‘A Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks...do we truly like the world we have made for ourselves?’ The Times America is in crisis."
Interesting Times
Murder and mayhem in Discworld! The funniest writer in fantasy strikes again with a witty and rollicking tale of golems, invisible killers and hapless security officers.
" -- Ancient Curse Another outrageously clever installment in the Discworld files, "Interesting Times" reminds the world why Terry Pratchett is considered the best fantasy and humor writer in the English speaking world."
The Pragmatic Constitution The Making of the American Government
Americans had been designing state and local governments since 1776. The American experience included a long period of British colonial domination and a Revolutionary War. It had taken some time for the Continental Congress to propose and implement the Articles of Confederation (1781). John Jay, Henry Know and Rufus King provided ideas about a new form of government. Congress adopted a resolution that endorsed a convention ""for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation."" What these pages contain are the ""unplugged"" goings-on recorded by James Madison, a key participant in the convention, that took place May-September 1787. At last, a simple, handy guide to the making of the American Constitution.
Are any of these careful measures observable in our government today? ... George Packer , author of “ Our Man : Richard Hoolbrooke and the End of the American Century ” paints a most disturbing picture of America's involvement in Vietnam ..."
Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy
In foreign policy, the Trump administration has appeared to depart from long-standing norms of international behavior that have underwritten American primacy for decades in a more interdependent and prosperous world. In this book, a diplomat and a historian revisit that perception by examining and reproducing several of their own essays during the past twenty years. The essays reveal that Trump's style exaggerates tendencies towards unilateralism already present in the actions, if not the policies, of previous presidents, and in their neglect of three imperatives: collective security, regional integration, and diplomatic imagination. It is not too late, however, to remedy the problem by learning the lessons of the recent past.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Perry, William J. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pfaff, William."
Mayday 1971
"A cinematic history of the largest act of civil disobedience in US history, in Richard Nixon's Washington."--
A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America's Biggest Mass Arrest Lawrence Roberts ... Packer , George . 2019. Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Knopf."
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
The dual biography of the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world and dedicated the remainder of their long lives to making a safer, more caring world. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's marriage of over seventy-five years is the longest of any American presidential couple and has been described by them as a full partnership. President Bill Clinton once said that they have changed more lives around the world than any couple in world history. Their lives have been public and private models of honesty and integrity in post-Watergate America. The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy. It picks up with their departure from the Georgia governor's mansion and their tireless campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the first time a Southerner won the White House in over a century. It details the Carter couple's struggle for recognition on a national stage, the challenges of rising energy costs, mounting inflation, geopolitical tensions, and the October Surprise that tainted the 1980 election in which they went down to defeat. During these years, Rosalynn demonstrated that she was a better politician than her husband, offering policy advice, serving as ambassador extraordinaire, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, and working determinedly to provide care and respect for those suffering from mental illness. Their post-presidential work has been unprecedented on the international stage with Habitat for Humanity and especially their establishment of the Carter Center to wage peace, fight disease, build hope. Carter, after reaching the zenith of his career in negotiating the Camp David Accords of 1978, continued for decades to work for peace in the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize which he quickly said equally belonged to Rosalynn and to the Carter Center. Among the greatest peacemakers of the twentieth century, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter emerge from this account as inspirational giants in American history and a shining example of the power of a couple in public service.
In Warren Christopher, et al. Editors. American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, 297–324. Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century ."
The Princeton Guide to Historical Research
The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He shows how researchers extract knowledge from the widest range of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, images, interviews, and datasets. He demonstrates how to use archives and libraries, read sources critically, present claims supported by evidence, tell compelling stories, and much more. Featuring a wealth of examples that illustrate the methods used by seasoned experts, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research reveals that, however varied the subject matter and sources, historians share basic tools in the quest to understand people and the choices they made. Offers practical step-by-step guidance on how to do historical research, taking readers from initial questions to final publication Connects new digital technologies to the traditional skills of the historian Draws on hundreds of examples from a broad range of historical topics and approaches Shares tips for researchers at every skill level
Similarly, if a writer is making arguments based on what they believe to be commonly accepted facts, it is not a surprise if they ... Margaret O 'Mara, The Code : Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin, 2019), 214."
The Long War
Just as U. S. soldiers and diplomats pulled out of Afghanistan, supposedly concluding their role and responsibility in the two-decade conflict, the country fell to the Taliban. In The Long War, award-winning BBC foreign correspondent David Loyn uncovers the political and military strategies—and failures—that prolonged America’s longest war. Three American presidents tried to defeat the Taliban—sending 150,000 international troops at the war’s peak with a trillion-dollar price tag. But early policy mistakes that allowed Osama bin Laden to escape made the task far more difficult. Deceived by easy victories, they backed ruthless corrupt local allies and misspent aid. The story of The Long War is told by the generals who led it through the hardest years of combat as surges of international troops tried to turn the tide. Generals, which include David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, Joe Dunford and John Allen, were tested in battle as never before. With the reputation of a “warrior monk,” McChrystal was considered one of the most gifted military leaders of his generation. He was one of two generals to be fired in this most public of commands. Holding together the coalition of countries who joined America’s fight in Afghanistan was just one part of the multi-dimensional puzzle faced by the generals, as they fought an elusive and determined enemy while responsible for thousands of young American and allied lives. The Long War goes behind the scenes of their command and of the Afghan government. The fourth president to take on the war, Joe Biden ordered troops to withdraw in 2021, twenty years after 9/11, just as the Taliban achieved victory, leaving behind an unstable nation and an unforeseeable future.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . London: Jonathan Cape, 2019. Powell, Jonathan. Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts. London: Bodley Head, 2014. Prucha, Francis Paul."
Insanity Defense
An insider's account of America's ineffectual approach to some of the hardest defense and intelligence issues in the three decades since the Cold War ended. Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. As a nation, America has cycled through the same defense and intelligence issues since the end of the Cold War. In Insanity Defense, Congresswoman Jane Harman chronicles how four administrations have failed to confront some of the toughest national security policy issues and suggests achievable fixes that can move us toward a safer future. The reasons for these inadequacies are varied and complex, in some cases going back generations. American leaders didn’t realize soon enough that the institutions and habits formed during the Cold War were no longer effective in an increasingly multi-power world transformed by digital technology and riven by ethno-sectarian conflict. Nations freed from the fear of the Soviets no longer deferred to America as before. Yet the United States settled into a comfortable, at times arrogant, position as the lone superpower. At the same time our governing institutions, which had stayed resilient, however imperfectly, through multiple crises, began their own unraveling. Congresswoman Harman was there—as witness, legislator, exhorter, enabler, dissident and, eventually, outside advisor and commentator. Insanity Defense is an insider’s account of decades of American national security—of its failures and omissions—and a roadmap to making significant progress on solving these perennially difficult issues.
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (2002) Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019) Panetta, Leon. Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (2014) Pelosi, Nancy."
The Last Brahmin
The first biography of a man who was at the center of American foreign policy for a generation Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. did—in the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and the Vatican. Lodge’s political influence was immense. He was the first person, in 1943, to see Eisenhower as a potential president; he entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate’s knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Lodge was effectively a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department’s portfolio, as ambassador to Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. Over his career, beginning with his arrival in the U.S. Senate at age thirty-four in 1937, when there were just seventeen Republican senators, he did more than anyone else to transform the Republican Party from a regional, isolationist party into the nation’s dominant force in foreign policy, a position it held from Eisenhower’s time until the twenty-first century. In this book, historian Luke A. Nichter gives us a compelling narrative of Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life. Lodge was among the last of the well‑heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Lodge took his secrets to the grave—including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
O'Neill, William L. Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971. Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019."
Nothing Is Impossible
Today Vietnam is one of America’s strongest international partners, with a thriving economy and a population that welcomes American visitors. How that relationship was formed is a twenty-year story of daring diplomacy and a careful thawing of tensions between the two countries after a lengthy war that cost nearly 60,000 American and more than two million Vietnamese lives. Ted Osius, former ambassador during the Obama administration, offers a vivid account, starting in the 1990s, of the various forms of diplomacy that made this reconciliation possible. He considers the leaders who put aside past traumas to work on creating a brighter future, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam veterans and ideological opponents who set aside their differences for a greater cause, and Pete Peterson—the former POW who became the first U.S. ambassador to a new Vietnam. Osius also draws upon his own experiences working first-hand with various Vietnamese leaders and traveling the country on bicycle to spotlight the ordinary Vietnamese people who have helped bring about their nation’s extraordinary renaissance. With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing Is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.
Ohler, Irene, and Đỗ Thùy Dương. Bà Triệu's 21st Century Daughters: Stories of Remarkable Vietnamese Women. Hanoi: Women's Publishing House, 2016. Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the ..."
Career Diplomacy
In this new and thoroughly revised edition of Career Diplomacy, Foreign Service veterans Harry W. Kopp and John K. Naland lay out what to expect in a Foreign Service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service—how to get in, get around, and get ahead. This guide offers readers a candid look at the profession.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Perkins, Dexter. “The Department of State and American Public Opinion.” In The Diplomats: 1919–1939, Vol. 1, The Twenties."
National Security Entrepreneurs and the Making of American Foreign Policy
Since the advent of the contemporary US national security apparatus in 1947, entrepreneurial public officials have tried to reorient the course of the nation's foreign policy. Acting inside the National Security Council system, some principals and high-ranking officials have worked tirelessly to generate policy change and innovation on the issues they care about. These entrepreneurs attempt to set the foreign policy agenda, frame policy problems and solutions, and orient the decision-making process to convince the president and other decision makers to choose the course they advocate. In National Security Entrepreneurs and the Making of American Foreign Policy Vincent Boucher, Charles-Philippe David, and Karine Prémont develop a new concept to study entrepreneurial behaviour among foreign policy advisers and offer the first comprehensive framework of analysis to answer this crucial question: why do some entrepreneurs succeed in guaranteeing the adoption of novel policies while others fail? They explore case studies of attempts to reorient US foreign policy waged by National Security Council entrepreneurs, examining the key factors enabling success and the main forces preventing the adoption of a preferred option: the entrepreneur's profile, presidential leadership, major players involved in the policy formulation and decision-making processes, the national political context, and the presence or absence of significant opportunities. By carefully analyzing significant diplomatic and military decisions of the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, and offering a preliminary account of contemporary national security entrepreneurship under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, this book makes the case for an agent-based explanation of foreign policy change and continuity.
Packer , George . “The Longest Wars: Richard Holbrooke and the Decline of American Power.” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 3 (2019): 46–68. – Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Knopf, 2019."
The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan
The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. Yet, while corrosive, these problems were not in themselves sufficient to have brought about a collapse. To a significant degree, they were the result of early failings in institutional design, reflecting an American inclination to pursue short-term policy approaches that created perverse incentives-thus interfering with the long-term objective of stability. This book exposes the true factors underpinning Kabul's fall. The Afghan Republic came under relentless attack from Taliban insurgents who depended critically on Pakistani support. It also suffered a creeping invasion that put the government on the back foot as the US tried and failed to deal with Pakistan's perfidy. The fatal blow came when bored US leaders naively cut an exit deal with the enemy, fatally compromising the operation of the Afghan army and air force and triggering the final collapse, with top leaders at odds over whether to make a final stand in Kabul. The Afghan Republic did not simply decline and fall. It was betrayed.
George Packer , Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2019) pp.530, 531. See also George Packer , 'The Betrayal', The Atlantic, 31 January 2022. W.B. Yeats, 'He wishes for the Cloths of ..."
Not One Inch
Thirty years after the Soviet Union's collapse, this book reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall "The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available."--Andrew Moravscik, Foreign Affairs Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange--but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union's own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, this book uses new evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in Vladimir Putin's rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined a potentially lasting partnership. Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte shows what went wrong.
America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate M. E. Sarotte. Njølstad, Olav, ed. The Last Decade of the Cold War: ... Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Knopf, 2019."
After Saigon's Fall
A new understanding of US policy toward Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War based on fresh archival discoveries.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Peterson, Pete E. The President, the Congress, and the Making of Foreign Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ..."
Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom
Understanding the role of religion in global politics is crucial for effective diplomacy. Many American policy makers are squeamish about religion’s role in diplomacy. Nevertheless, religion plays a crucial and complex part in global affairs, such as in sustainable development, various human rights issues, and fomenting and mitigating conflict. Shaun A. Casey, the founding director of the US Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, makes a compelling case for the necessity of understanding global religion in Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom. In this fresh and provocative narrative, Casey writes frankly about his work integrating sophisticated, research-driven policy into the State Department under Secretary of State John Kerry. Their new strategy went beyond older paradigms that focused myopically on religious freedom or countering violent extremism. Such reductive approaches, Casey insists, cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in the US’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003. Witty and astute, Casey recounts his team’s challenges in DC politics as well as in the major global events of his tenure, including climate change, the rise of ISIL, and the refugee crisis. On a global stage with higher stakes than ever, effective diplomacy is imperative. Yet in this critical moment, the United States’s reputation has faltered. Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom offers a path forward to better foreign policy.
... 2020); George Packer , Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2019); and Ben Rhodes, e World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random House, 2018). 43."
Barack and Joe
A Washington Post 2019 Notable Selection A vivid and inspiring account of the "bromance" between Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The extraordinary partnership of Barack Obama and Joe Biden is unique in American history. The two men, their characters and styles sharply contrasting, formed a dynamic working relationship that evolved into a profound friendship. Their affinity was not predestined. Obama and Biden began wary of each other: Obama an impatient freshman disdainful of the Senate's plodding ways; Biden a veteran of the chamber and proud of its traditions. Gradually they came to respect each other's values and strengths and rode into the White House together in 2008. Side-by-side through two tension-filled terms, they shared the day-to-day joys and struggles of leading the most powerful nation on earth. They accommodated each other's quirks: Biden's famous miscues kept coming, and Obama overlooked them knowing they were insignificant except as media fodder. With his expertise in foreign affairs and legislative matters, Biden took on an unprecedented role as chief adviser to Obama, reshaping the vice presidency. Together Obama and Biden guided Americans through a range of historic moments: a devastating economic crisis, racial confrontations, war in Afghanistan, and the dawn of same-sex marriage nationwide. They supported each other through highs and lows: Obama provided a welcome shoulder during the illness and death of Biden's son Beau. As many Americans turn a nostalgic eye toward the Obama presidency, Barack and Joe offers a new look at this administration, its absence of scandal, dedication to truth, and respect for the media. This is the first book to tell the full story of this historic relationship and its substantial impact on the Obama presidency and its legacy.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Knopf, 2019. . The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013. Pfeiffer, Dan."
The Unknown Enemy
Exposes the fallacy that an increased degree of socio-cultural understanding leads to a greater chance of success in counterinsurgency operations.
... and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Packer , George , Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2019) Paret, Peter, French Revolutionary ..."
The Outlier
“Important . . . [a] landmark presidential biography . . . Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”—The New York Times Book Review An essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Jimmy Carter’s presidential legacy—from the expert biographer and Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird deftly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history. As president, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. This outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor, and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Decades before today’s public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s ethos and its actions, Carter looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. The cost of his unshakable belief in doing the right thing would be losing his re-election bid—and witnessing the ascendance of Reagan. In these remarkable pages, Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, taking readers inside the Oval Office and through Carter’s battles with both a political establishment and a Washington press corps that proved as adversarial as any foreign power. Bird shows how issues still hotly debated today—from national health care to growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—burned at the heart of Carter’s America, and consumed a president who found a moral duty in solving them. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.
Jimmy Carter , America's " Malaise " and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country . New York : Bloomsbury , 2009 . ... Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York : Knopf , 2019 ."
The Afghanistan Papers
A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 \u200bThe #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
Neumann , Ronald E. The Other War : Winning and Losing in Afghanistan . Washington , D.C .: Potomac Books , Inc. , 2009 . Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century ."
NATO in the Cold War and After
This book examines episodes in NATO’s history from the founding of the North Atlantic Alliance in 1949 to its transition to the post-Cold War order in the 1990s, with an eye to better understanding its present and its future. NATO’s history, now running over seventy years, can no longer be framed in Cold War terms alone. Nor can the organization be understood fully as a post-Cold War institution. Today’s NATO is a product of both these eras. This edited volume offers a reconsideration of NATO’s place in history, looking both at how the alliance coped with the Cold War and how it managed its difficult transition to the post-Cold War international order. Contributors recount how NATO coped with its many political and operational challenges, which on occasion threatened – but never managed to – derail the alliance. The book opens new vistas for explaining how NATO thrived and survived for decades and ponders whether it will survive for many more. The book will be of great value to scholars, students and policymakers interested in Politics, International Studies, Global Affairs and Public Policy. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Strategic Studies.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Alfted A. Knopf, 2019). Parkhalina, Tat'yana, 'Rossiya I NATO: Problema Vospriyatiya', Aktual'nye Problemy Evropy 2 (2000), 105–25."
The Absolutely Indispensable Man
A wide-ranging political biography of diplomat, Nobel prize winner, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche. A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten. In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history. He shows that Bunche was not only a singular figure in midcentury America; he was also one of the key architects of the postwar international order. Raustiala tells the story of Bunche's dramatic life, from his early years in prewar Los Angeles to UCLA, Harvard, the State Department, and the heights of global diplomacy at the United Nations. After narrowly avoiding assassination Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize for his ground-breaking mediation of the first Arab-Israeli conflict, catapulting him to popular fame. A central player in some of the most dramatic crises of the Cold War, he pioneered conflict management and peacekeeping at the UN. But as Raustiala argues, his most enduring achievement was his work to dismantle European empire. Bunche perceptively saw colonialism as the central issue of the 20th century and decolonization as a project of global racial justice. From marching with Martin Luther King to advising presidents and prime ministers, Ralph Bunche shaped our world in lasting ways. This definitive biography gives him his due. It also reminds us that postwar decolonization not only fundamentally transformed world politics, but also powerfully intersected with America's own civil rights struggle.
George Packer , Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019). 48. Stanley Meisler, The United Nations: The First 50 Years (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), at 182. 49."
The Terrorism Trap
After two decades and trillions of dollars, the United States’ fight against terrorism has achieved mixed results. Despite the vast resources and attention expended since 9/11, terrorism has increased in many societies that have been caught up in the war on terror. Why have U.S. policies been unable to stem the tide of violence? Harrison Akins reveals how the war on terror has had the unintended consequence of increasing domestic terrorism in U.S. partner states. He examines the results of U.S.-backed counterterrorism operations that targeted al-Qaeda in peripheral regions of partner states, over which their central governments held little control. These operations often provoked a violent backlash from local terrorist groups, leading to a spike in retaliatory attacks against partner states. Senior U.S. officials frequently failed to grasp the implications of the historical conflict between central governments and the targeted peripheries. Instead, they exerted greater pressure on partner states to expand their counterterrorism efforts. This exacerbated the underlying conditions that drove the escalating attacks, trapping these governments in a deadly cycle of tit-for-tat violence with local terrorist groups. This process, Akins demonstrates, accounts for the lion’s share of the al Qaeda network’s global terrorist activity since 2001. Drawing on extensive primary sources—including newly declassified documents, dozens of in-depth interviews with leading government officials in the United States and abroad, and statistical analysis—The Terrorism Trap is a groundbreaking analysis of why counterterrorism has backfired.
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Pape, Robert A. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005."
Do Morals Matter?
What is the role of ethics in American foreign policy? The Trump Administration has elevated this from a theoretical question to front-page news. Should ethics even play a role, or should we only focus on defending our material interests? In Do Morals Matter? Joseph S. Nye provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of how modern American presidents have-and have not-incorporated ethics into their foreign policy. Nye examines each presidency during theAmerican era post-1945 and scores them on the success they achieved in implementing an ethical foreign policy. Alongside this, he evaluates their leadership qualities, explaining which approaches work and which ones do not.
The personalities and politics behind this strategy are described well in George Packer , Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . ( New York : PenguinRandom House , 2019 ) . 11. James D. Boys , Clinton's Grand ..."
Start Now
From the New York Times bestselling author, “a compelling guide to determine what you wish to do in life, and the best ways to build a meaningful career” (Ken Auletta, bestselling author). Newcomers to the workplace. The recently fired. Those desiring to advance with their current employer, and those eager to move on. And many who have found what they do for a living deadening, disappointing, and tedious. For these reasons and others one in five Americans change jobs every year. Drawing on his extensive career in the non-profit, commercial, and public service realms, Reynold Levy will help you think about your future creatively and prepare for it resourcefully. How to network naturally and adeptly. How to interview effectively. How to perform well in your current job. He will offer you a recipe for moving up in an appealing organization or moving out gracefully to a better position elsewhere. Start Now offers concrete, actionable, practical advice: Taking fullest advantage of school, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Learning how to succeed at work without being imprisoned there. Asking others for help compellingly. “This book is about work—finding work you love, getting it, doing it well, leaving it—but it is also a book about how to live. Part memoir, part social analysis, part practical guide, it is a terrific read: wise and fun, deep and light, full of stories about people and problems, and the sheer good pleasure of a job that gives back to the world. Never moralizing, just right, Start Now is a book for us all.” —Jennifer Homans, New York Times bestselling author
Packer , George . Our Man : Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Riesman, David, and Judith Block McLaughlin. Choosing a College President: Opportunities and Constraints."
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