Bill Bryson is a true master of popular narrative. Over the course of his career, he has bestowed a beautiful clarity on even the most recondite of subjects...Has history ever been so enjoyable?

A fascinating snapshot of a season during which America, for better or worse, ushered in the modern world.

A gifted raconteur...The book is filled with eccentric, flamboyant characters and memorable stories...highly amusing.

A great new form of literature: biography of a few months in one country.

Few writers of nonfiction, and,let's be honest,few enough writers of novels, can crack the narrative whip like Bryson. One Summer fairly whirls along...full of exhilarating, fact-filled fun...surely the most sublime distraction published this year.

Bryson is a master of the sidelong, a man who can turn obscurity into hilarity with seemingly effortless charm - and One Summer: America 1927 is an entertaining addition to a body of work that is at its best when it celebrates the unexpected and the obscure...a jolly jalopy ride of a book; Bryson runs down the byways of American history and finds diversion in every roadside stop.

A wonderful book on a pivotal year, in which the gravitational pull of the world shifted from Europe to America.

Has captured the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties in this entertaining and informative book.

This splendid book, written in the breezy and humorous style that has come to be Bryson's trademark, is sure to delight.

Another winner...witty and engrossing.

Immaculately researched and lit up by [Bill Bryson's] marvellous anecdotal and descriptive skills.

Wry but scholarly infotainment...One Summer wins you over by the sheer weight of its encylopedic enthusiasms...Bryson's winning love of the ridiculous finds a rich seam in charting the rise and fall of America's great men...there is tumultuous energy in this serio-hilarious fan letter. In short, it's a bit like America itself.

Bryson writes in a style as effervescent as the time itself...No one is immune to Bryson's irreverence...a wonderful romp.

Exuberant...he propels his story forward with enviable skill and inexhaustible verve...Byson's summer of 1927 seems like a boisterous American version of the British summerof 1913, another high point of that fabled innocence which America was always doomed to lose.

The T&Cs of a bank loan could be made eloquent in the hands of Bryson so with this rich material, the book sings.

A brilliant, abrasive diplomat struggles to resolve foreign conflicts while fighting bureaucratic wars at home in this scintillating biography… Packer makes him a Shakespearean character—egomaniacal, devious, sloppy enough to make presidents deny him the prize of becoming secretary of state, yet charismatic and inspiring—in a larger-than-life portrait brimming with vivid novelistic impressions… In Holbrooke’s thwarted ambitions, Packer finds both a riveting tale of diplomatic adventure—part high drama, part low pettiness—and a captivating metaphor for America’s waning power.

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.

The riveting life of a deeply flawed diplomat whose chief shortcoming seems to have been the need to be more recognized than he was... Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of character and events.

It is impossible to read George Packer’s new biography of Richard Holbrooke without a piercing sense of melancholy, not only that a man so supremely alive should be dead, but also because such people — Our Man, in Packer’s title, the incarnation of vanished glory, imperial hubris, exceptional Americanism — no longer walk the earth… Extraordinary.

Stunning... If you’re one of the dozens of people running for president, the book is probably the best guide you can find to navigating a transitional moment in American leadership and foreign policy. For the rest of us, it’s a gripping read, and a sad one.

Through a depiction that may be likened to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Packer analyzes the forces of character that led us from a commitment to unity to the chaotic division in which we find ourselves today.

Best appreciated like a novel, consumed whole… charming, brilliant, cocksure.

Like Holbrooke, Packer’s account barrels along, brimming with mischief, verve and a sense of history. Unlike Holbrooke, it is tender and self-aware.

An endlessly engaging biography.

Our Man… [is] a fascinating examination of the (few) successes and (many) failures of US foreign policy over the last fifty years.

[Our Man is] heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time