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

‘By the end of the second page, maybe the 3rd, you’ll be connected…There hardly ever was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom on the subject of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End from the American Hundred years is a book quite like this — sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, similar to the man himself.’–David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe

Richard Holbrooke was excellent, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of nearly inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the power behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America’s best diplomatic accomplishment in the post-Cold Battle period. His power lay in an utter perception in himself and his idea of a muscular, ample foreign policy. From his times as a adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to get rid of the battle in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to consider the lead on the global stage. But his razor-sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion made certain that he hardly ever rose to the best levels in federal government that he therefore desperately sought after. His story is thus the storyplot of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, aswell as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Guy, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that’s both personal and epic in its revelatory family portrait of this outstanding and deeply flawed man and the top notch spheres of society and federal government he inhabited.