Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century Audiobook (Free)

‘Portrays Holbrooke in every of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory…Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy… If you could browse one book to comprehend American’s foreign plan and its own quixotic forays into quicksands within the last 50 years, this would be it.’–Walter Isaacson, THE BRAND NEW York Times Publication Review

‘By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be connected…There by no means was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there rarely approximately Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Hundred years is a book that can compare with this — sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself.’–David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe

Richard Holbrooke was outstanding, 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 accomplishment in the post-Cold Battle era. His power lay in an utter perception in himself and his notion of a muscular, large foreign plan. From his times as a adviser in Vietnam to his last attempts to end the battle in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to consider the lead within the global stage. But his sharpened elbows and tireless self-promotion made certain that he never rose to the best levels in authorities that he so desperately coveted. His story is certainly thus the story of America during its period of supremacy: its strength, drive, and feeling of possibility, aswell as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. INSIDE OUR Guy, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we receive a nonfiction narrative that’s both romantic and epic in its revelatory portrait of this outstanding and deeply flawed guy and the elite spheres of culture and authorities he inhabited.