George Packer – författare

From the award-winning and bestselling author of the The Unwinding--the vividly told saga of the ambition, idealism, and hubris of one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history, set amid the rise and fall of U.S. power from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, 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. Holbrooke's story is 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. Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of an extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

One of The New York Times''s 100 notable books of 2021"[George Packer''s] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington PostAcclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and dividesIn the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy.In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression.In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR BEST BOOK Selected by New York Times'' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book A Washington Post Best Political Book A New Republic Best BookA riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins'' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet''s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era''s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer''s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

Based on George Packer''s account in The New Yorker, Betrayed is a riveting and morally complex drama that explores in the Iraqis'' own words the ways in which we have already abandoned them. Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country''s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America''s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it by aiding the U.S. forces constitute a small minority. On a cold, wet night in January 2007, George Packer met two such Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, in central Baghdad to hear their story and those of other Iraqis working as translators and additional key personnel for the U.S. military and occupation authorities. They assumed that their perspective would be valuable to foreigners who knew little or nothing of Iraq. But instead of respect and gratitude, those who chose to help bridge the gap between the occupiers and the occupied were met with suspicion and hostility. They have been killed by insurgents and militias, ignored by U.S. officials, fired from their jobs without reason or recourse, and prevented from fleeing to the States for safety. Betrayed had its world premiere in January 2008, off-Broadway at the Culture Project.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR BEST BOOK Selected by New York Times'' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book A Washington Post Best Political Book A New Republic Best BookA riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins'' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet''s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era''s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer''s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family''s politically active historyGeorge Packer''s maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century--an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer''s father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Brought to you by Penguin.What happened to America? Is there still hope?We have arrived at a critical moment in American history. The United States is divided, its democracy is shaken. But all is not lost.The remarkable fruit of two decades of research, Last Best Hope is a riveting, urgent, clear-sighted analysis of how America got here, and how it can move forward. It presents a hopeful vision for a radical reform of American life - one that enables meaningful change, via policy, legislation, executive action, civic activism, scholarship and the media. Drawing on the best of American history - what once made it great - without being trapped in the past, Last Best Hope dares America to step into a new and better era.The thrilling new work from one of America''s most incisive thinkers, Last Best Hope is a modern classic of political and societal commentary.''One of the most talented non-fiction writers in the US.'' FINANCIAL TIMES *BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2019*''Arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation.'' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS© George Packer 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021