Colossus confirms Niall Ferguson's standing as one of the most incisive writers of history, politics and economics today

One of the timeliest and most topical books to have appeared in recent years

Yet another tour de force from a writer who displays all his usual gifts of forceful polemic, unconventional intelligence and elegant prose ... guaranteed to spark fierce debate

A bravura exploration of why Americans are not cut out to be imperialists but nonetheless have an empire. Vigorous, substantive, and worrying

Packer is one of the most talented non-fiction writers in the US. In his hands, a biography of a diplomat who never quite made it to the top becomes a history of modern America’s entanglement with the world.

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none… A fascinating and compulsive read.

Our Man is a great, exuberant read, gossipy and thoughtful, about a remarkable American diplomat who tried to place himself at the heart of some of the bloodiest, most intractable wars of our age: Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan… Packer displays his talents as a master of narrative reconstruction.

Dazzling… an exploration of American decline that’s heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time... Packer marshals a huge amount of material with great aplomb… His prose fizzes with almost Holbrookian levels of energy.

Deeply researched, compelling... Our Man is not just a portrait of a fascinating historical figure, it is a contemplation of a half century of US foreign and security policy and its most intractable challenges.

George Packer [is] arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation… Our Man may be the most vivid tour of America’s foreign delusions that has been offered since the Vietnam War.

[Packer] is such a masterful narrator – and Holbrooke such a vexing subject to portray – that this story is both gripping and surprisingly pacey, its wheels greased by revealing excerpts from Holbrooke's personal letters and the private reflections he recorded to tape. Added to this is Packer's arresting thesis: that his brash but erudite and driven subject symbolises something about America's engagement with the world following the Second World War that will never be recovered after Trump.

A brazen book, one that buttonholes the reader…in just the way that its subject did… So perfectly has Packer captured his [Holbrooke’s] style that there is no sense of discontinuity when the subject himself takes over as author… Enthralling… Our Man is unputdownable.

Brilliant reporting… brave and intellectually honest… This is the kind of biography (massive, detailed) by the kind of author (respected, experienced) reserved for great books on great men.

Packer’s portrait is so full because he… [is] a first-rate reporter and writer who understands the history of the big conflicts at the centre of his story: Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan… A vivid biography.

The story has been told many times… but it has never been told as George Packer tells it… Our Man is a nuanced portrait of a driven man whose brilliance was held back by his almost comical insecurities… Packer is an accomplished reporter and careful writer, and he manages to sketch out the three conflicts at the heart of Holbrooke’s career – Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan – with subtlety and texture.

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