Diplomacy and The American Century

George Packer is the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, 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. In Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (Knopf), as he examines the life and work of one of the most influential American diplomats of the past four decades, Packer explores the supremacy and decline of the United States. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to lead on the global stage. Drawing from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, Packer constructs a narrative that is both intimate and epic, and offers a revelatory portrait of an extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited. Walter Isaacson, in The New York Times Book Review, called Our Man "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 quick sands over the past 50 years, this would be it."

Kai Bird is the Executive Director of CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. He co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy—and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis. His most recent book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. He is currently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter.