George PackerAnmeldelser

Excellent profiles of ordinary people--and a few famous ones who don't seem to fit into this book at all. The book is clearly a collection of New Yorker pieces, and no attempt has been made to fit them into a narrative whole or social argument--this is the one serious weakness in what otherwise is a fine, revealing, and ultimately disheartening look at contemporary America.

Issue play.

Americans have a short collective memory when it comes to political upheaval. It's one thing to learn about and study cultural disruptions from a historical point of view. In something else entirely to have lived through them. In Last Best Hope George Packer is writing from within one of those moments of disruptive change It's the same moment I'm living through right now, circa the third decade of the 21st century. We're still too close to current events to fully appreciate the long view, but history shows us that these events are inevitable from time to time. But at the same time, we've never been at *this* particular moment in time, with all its digital and global influences, so trying to forecast the outcome is nearly impossible.

America is going through a crisis. The whole world is by a similar measure if we're being honestly inclusive. This is a topic I've been fascinated about since before Donald Trump entered the international stage. The rise of Trump told me there were factors in play that I didn't understand. And then COVID-19 hit and accelerated ALL problems, possibly bringing them to a head far sooner than they otherwise would have. To say we live in interesting times would be a massive understatement.

George Packer's Last Best Hope is an stunning look back at the core principles of America and democracy in an effort to see past, and maybe resolve, the country's current political and cultural divides. A brighter tomorrow isn't inevitable, but it certainly isn't impossible.

Essential.

Amerika hat seine eigene Geschichte und die in diesem Buch ineinander verschlungenen Biografien zeigen die ganze Bandbreite der Möglichkeiten eines Landes, das Freiheit und Glück auf seine Fahnen geschrieben hat, Selbstbestimmung und die Chance, dass es jeder schaffen kann. Letzteres mag gestimmt haben, früher, heute driften die Einkommen und Bildungschancen soweit auseinander, dass die Spannung nicht mehr erträglich ist.

Besonders interessiert hat mich die Werdegang von Peter Thiel, der 1967 in Frankfurt geboren wurde. Er reiste mit seinen Eltern weit herum und besuchte unzählige Schulen, erhielt viele Eindrücke. Ein eher ruhiges, introrvertiertes Kind, hochbegabt und irgendwann mitten im Tsunami des Neuen Marktes. Er gründet mit einem Partner paypal und finanziert als einer der Anschubfinanziers Marc Zuckerberg bzw. Facebook, er wird Milliardär mit Ende 30. Peter Thiel interessiert sich insb. für die Zusammenarbeit von Menschen bzw. die Kernfrage, was besser nach vorne bringt: Konkurrenz oder Kooperation. Obwohl libertär denkend, also eine geringe Bevormundung durch den Staat wollend, glaubt er nur bedingt an den kompetitiven Kapitalismus. Er sieht ein Zusammenspiel aller Menschen bzw. ein Erkennen von schlechten Staaten oder Gruppen - u.a. über das Internet, also eine Emanzipation aller Menschen von Bevormundungen jeglicher Art. Paypal sollte im ursprünglichen Szenario Menschen unabhängig machen von Banken etc. Insgesamt eine interessante Sichtweise, die mir sehr viele neue Anregungen gab. Seine Ansicht über den Tod, den es zu vermeiden gilt, teile ich nicht. Trotzdem ist sein Standpunkt interessant, ich neige zu der Sichtweise Steve Jobs, der meinte, dass der nahende Tod erst Leistungen vollbringen lässt. Andererseits: wenn man unendlich Zeit hätte, wären immer neue Chancen für alle irgendwann soweit gerecht bzw. für alle fair, dass man seine ureigene Berufung entdecken würde.

Newt Gingrich ist ein Politiker durch und durch, seine Wort-Anweisungen für erfolgreiche politische Kommunikation lässt einen frieren. Bös und gut, dieser ewige Widerpart wird von rhetorischen Könnern wie ihn beherrscht, sie denken nicht mehr daran, etwas zu bewegen, neue Dimensionen zu zeigen, sondern nur noch an mediale Siege und NIederlagen - Politik in ihrer leersten Form. Es gelingt Gingrich nicht, Clinton zu stürzen, später wird dann klar, dass er selbst jahrelang ein Verhältnis zu einer jüngeren Mitarbeiterin hatte. Peter Thiel hält nichts von solchen Politikern, die nur mitschwimmen, aber nichts aktiv bewegen, keine Innovationen entwickeln.

Alle Staaten, die nicht flexibel bleiben, die sich zu sehr auf Größe und Tradition verlassen, scheitern irgendwann. Wie schon Aristoteles gesagt hat, kommt es darauf an, niemand zu mächtig werden zu lassen, weder durch Geld noch durch Gesetze bzw. Politiker. Vielleicht wäre es besser - wie dies N.N. Taleb in seinem Buch Antifragilität: Anleitung für eine Welt, die wir nicht verstehen empfiehlt -, wenn Politiker per Losvefahren gewählt würden, um Parteienküngel und Korruption vorzubeugen.

Dass die Wallstreet die Macht übernommen hat, Banken und Finanzkapital, es ist das Dilemma unserer Zeit, herkommend aus Amerika, der Tropf an dem wir alle hängen und der uns fluten wird, wenn wir nicht beginnen zu begreifen. Das einzige Wachstum, das ich sehe, liegt in der Kreativität von Menschen, die bislang in Sicherheit und Ruhe, in Tradition und Chancenglück gewogen wurden, ohne jemals begriffen zu haben, was Freiheit wirklich bedeutet.

s a biographer myself, I really enjoyed Packer's voice and style in this biography. It can be quite insightful and downright humorous at times. Richard Holbrooke is a lively subject who served every Democratic administration in some capacity from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. Being best friends with then Secretary of State Dean Rusk's son certainly didn't hurt. But it is telling that while Holbrooke was a gifted networker who amassed a staggering amount of friendships and acquaintances among the elite, he repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capability to poison those relationships and alienate these same powerful people. While Rusk served as something of a pseudo father figure to Holbrook, Holbrooke still managed to estrange him. This pattern repeated over and again. Packer, who himself was among Holbrooke's numerous acquaintances, doesn't shy away from the fact that Holbrooke was, to be blunt, an asshole. We get some interesting glimpses of the presidents, bureaucratic battles, turf wars, policy-making, and, most of all, diplomacy in Our Man.

This book had a particular narrative style that doesn't work well for me. The author told the personal stories of multiple people who have been living through the "unwinding" of American culture. The stories were well told. Packer has a gift for bringing people and places to life. However, he clearly had a point to make, but he wouldn't just come out and say it. It was biographies with an agenda, and he never said what the agenda was. The other thing that bugged me was that the book just ended when it got to the present day. There was no conclusion, no closure. Between these two factors, I came away from the book unsatisfied.

It wouldn't have taken much to dramatically change my opinion. The exact same book with an epilogue in the style of the prologue would have been enough to round of the book and the still-ongoing-in-real-life stories of the highlighted individuals.

The prologue was the one part of this book that I loved without reserve. It managed to convey the essence of the story of the past 40 years in just a few pages. It's worth reading, even if you read nothing else. (And, I suspect that, conveniently, the Amazon Kindle preview chapter would include it without having to purchase the whole thing.)

Non Fiction, Read, 2022

A powerful account of the political and personal examining (and empathizing with) successive generations caught on the wrong side of history by their adherence to principle. In recognizing both past liberal achievements and the potential for future projects it's a inspiration to cure disaffection.

One of the best books I’ve read this decade. Feb, 2022

Like Wildland which I read last month, this book is another attempt to explain how America got to the position in which it currently finds itself. Packer sees 4 opposing narratives by which Americans define themselves:

1. FREE AMERICA--(basically Republicans)-libertarian, tax cuts, deregulation, individualism, property rights (no public investment), hostility to government, religious traditionalists, break the unions, starve social programs, nationalistic. This group is represented by Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Sean Hannity, and others of their ilk. Tax cuts and deregulation equals freedom and prosperity. They mobilize anger and despair by offering up scapegoats.

2. SMART AMERICA--(basically Democrats) success depends on brainpower, not accumulation of wealth. Meritocracy, social liberalism, fairness, but if you don't make the cut you have no one to blame but yourself. Smart America lost the white working class. Sees the answer to all problems as education.

3. REAL AMERICA--this began with Sarah Palin (who Packer describes as John the Baptist for the coming of Trump). Proud ignorance and contempt for the establishment and for experts. Anti-intellectual, the country of white people, religious and nationalistic, an offshoot of FREE AMERICA, but they pay the costs of Americas liars.

4. JUST AMERICA--seeks continuous wrongs to be battled. assaults the meritocracy of SMART AMERICA, identity politics and political correctness, not just concerned with race, some followers are socialists, environmentalists, feminists; "Something is deeply wrong; our society is unjust; our institutions are corrupt." Its members are mostly young and well-educated; because the most desireable occupations have contracted our cities have large populations of overeducated and underemployed young people; intolerant and coercive.

Packer states, "Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what others want to avoid. They arise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us up, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and evermore extreme version of itself."

I found Packer's division of the country into these four factions to have a reasonable basis in fact, and an interesting way to describe the problem. He also offers some solutions to try to bring us back together once more as a country. Most of his suggestions are related in some way to addressing the extreme economic inequalities prevailing nowadays. Looking at our Congress, its inability to address the massive voter suppression efforts well underway, as well as the extreme politization of the Supreme Court, I personally don't have much hope that there is going to be a solution to the problem any time soon.
3 stars

This is the best book I have read this year.

Packer looks at the changing landscape of America through the eyes and voice of those deeply involved in it.½

An excellent analysis of the current American moment, informed by previous periods when it felt like the American experiment might fail, and how we emerged from them a stronger union. Inspiring and hopeful, in a way, while also quite terrifying. This book provides some tools to help us think about ur current situation, and perhaps, to muddle through.

"These years we're living through feel like the 1850s, one crisis after another, an impending collapse that keeps being postponed, and unbearable tension between mutual hatred and inconceivable disunion. There have been several near-death experiences in American history: The Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the 60s, and the nearest of all the Civil War. Each of them was in some way brought on by inequality, the broken American code, none starker than that between citizen and slave. We're living through one of our own. It throws up different problems and makes different demands, but nothing is really new. Earlier Americans used the same tools of citizenship that are in our possession - journalism, government, activism - when they thought democracy was about to commit suicide. They show us ways of being American, that we've forgotten that can fortify and instruct us in our own crisis."

Sometimes, I pick up a book, highly recommended, and don't think I'll ever be able to finish it. "The Unwinding" was one of those. About 25% of the way into the book, I began to ask myself what was the point of the book might be, and whether I should just cut my losses and lay the book aside. But I persevered, and and gradually became wrapped up with the stories of the individuals Packer introduced.

Packer uses the stories of a variety of individuals to tell his story of how American society has changed over the past fifty years. There are winners and losers, and Packer alternates between their stories in weaving his story. He lets their individual stories of hardship, failure, or success show how society has changed and continues to change, and doesn't try to draw a clear conclusion. Rather, he lets the reader draw his own conclusions about these changes and the positives and negatives.

Packer just picked up a National Book Award for this work, which puts him in the august company of Caro, Chernow, Rhodes, Lukas, etc. I can't rate this work quite that highly though - it's one of those situations where I liked every paragraph, but felt they added up to something a bit less than the sum of their parts. Maybe I was expecting something more along the lines of Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal or Matt Taibbi's Griftopia instead of the Studs Terkel/John Dos Passos homage the book actually more closely resembles. It's a good example of both the strengths and weaknesses of the "narrative" style of economic policy discussion, where everything is a story and numbers are incidental if not wholly absent. Thomas Frank, of What's the Matter With Kansas? fame, wrote a pretty good review of this book that I happen to mostly agree with, so I'll just add a few notes instead of rehashing all of his points.

Packer has produced what feels like an endless succession of longform journalism articles (and in fact some of this book is taken from his work at the New Yorker), each profiling a person or a family. Some - North Carolina biodiesel evangelist/entrepreneur Dean Price, Alabama-born Biden/Kaufmann staffer Jeff Connaughton, Youngstown factory worker-turned-community organizer Tammy Thomas - become "main characters", with chunks of their stories reappearing every few dozen pages, some don't and are used mostly to add a human face to places like Tampa's endless sprawl, the trading desks of Wall Street, Washington DC's lobbyist warrens, or Silicon Valley's startup scene. There are also capsule biographies of a number of famous people - Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Raymond Carver, Sam Walton, Peter Thiel, Colin Powell, Alice Waters, Robert Rubin, Jay-Z, Andrew Breitbart, and Elizabeth Warren - who I guess are supposed to be emblematic of the era in some way, and every so often there will be an interlude of newspaper clipping-type soundbites from a specific year to help flesh out the zeitgeist in the manner of John Dos Passos' famous USA trilogy. Many of the stories are quite moving, all are very well-written, and some, like the sections on Peter Thiel or the final chapter with Price, offer tantalizing glimpses of possible directions for the economy to head in over the next few years.

But glimpses are all that are given, and where this book disappoints is that outside of an essentially linear timeline, there doesn't seem to be much holding the book together. It's an "Inner History of the New America", yet I couldn't help but notice the almost total absence of analysis, to say nothing of prescription. Packer is very careful to let his characters speak for themselves and never openly editorializes, though of course his choice of what to include and what to exclude is a judgment call in itself, but that same lack of authorial judgment makes the moment when I closed the book and started thinking unusually empty. So much of the book is filled with moments that cry out for some kind of solution: the nightmare sprawl of Tampa, the unconstrained rapacity of the banks, the reactionary howling of the Tea Partiers, the grim cycles of Rust Belt poverty, yet Packer's own voice seems silent, which might be a strength but could also be a cop-out. Frank, in his review, was fairly pessimistic about the ability of any economic journalism like this to change anything; I'm not sure that's true on the whole, but though I was riveted by each person's story and impressed by the sheer amount of time Packer had put into his research, I certainly missed the typically obligatory last chapter when the author at least makes the effort to offer suggestions. Major social movements like Occupy Wall Street are chronicled at length, yet it's unclear what they mean to the characters, the author, or to the reader.

Paradoxically, though the extreme amount of detail threatens to overwhelm the reader with every nuance of how these characters ended up in the situations they're in, their stories can't really be properly understood without some simple charts and graphs. Maybe these people are each emblematic of some facets of the "New America", but it would be nice to see some statistics to back that theory up. It's all well and good to uncritically present rants from people in the name of "objectivity" - after all, everyone has their own, most likely equally ludicrous theories of What's Really Going On, and it is more immersive to hear people's stories straight up - but why not, after dutifully reporting that Tampa-area goofball Kathy Jaroch hates Agenda 21 for the typical nutcase black helicopter-type reasons, at least mention what it actually is somewhere, just for some context? For example, Michael Grunwald's excellent history of the stimulus, The New New Deal, took great pains to faithfully transcribe the doubts and fears of the bill's opponents without bias or twisting their words, yet he never failed to actually present the research to rebut their criticisms. Are there many people who were convinced by his facts and figures? Probably not, yet his book is more complete and more accurate because of them. Maybe Packer didn't want to offend anyone, or maybe he thought it would sell better without editorializing, or maybe he was just content to let others do the number-crunching and arguing and suggestion-offering. Either way, I did really enjoy the stories he told, and his book is a good document that does in some way reflect the spirit of our times.

This book is pretty hard to categorize. It's a tale of the overall changes in America from mid-20c to 2012, told through personal stories which are very different from one another but collectively probably representative of many Americans. There was a great mix of massively successful businesspeople, struggling entrepreneurs, and people from the middle class moving down or struggling to stay in place, and people from rough backgrounds moving up. Many major events (2008 financial crisis, in particular, and deindustrialization of the 70s/80s) were present from several perspectives. A few stories which were highly relevant to me were missing (dotcom boom, higher education bubble), but overall it was comprehensive for the period.

Tough sledding as virus tops 100k in US and cities are on fire but this is first rate journalism. Enlightening, engrossing and deeply researched.

A very informative book, on how the US has changed economy at home but also abroad. It is a book that either depresses you or makes you angry. I belong to the second group, and wonder what will it take for the people, not only in the US but globally, to take back in their own hands the destiny of this planet? Because one is for certain: those that are at the reins now cannot be trusted.

Engrossing—George Packer is a master storyteller who takes what, in other hands, could be a dry retelling of a man’s life and makes it an absolute page turner.

Packer is clear-eyed about Holbrooke’s flaws, critiquing him without falling into invective, and highlights his strengths without degenerating into romanticization.

While I would have liked a little bit more analysis of Holbrooke’s life as allegory for the US, I can appreciate Packer’s restraint where so many writers are heavy handed, hitting the reader over the head with their metaphor.

Overall an excellent read, and highly recommended for politics and history nerds.

Richard Holbrooke started his career in Vietnam and finished it trying to end the Afghan war. The author links Holbrooke’s career and diplomatic approach with the end of the American Century. He was the last to be able to pursue American-led multilateral efforts to solve international issues. In this view, he was the last of a kind (including before him Harriman and Kennan) and the role of American power inevitably declined in the 21st century in a post-super power world. The author sums up Holbrook’s “doctrine” as American leadership in managing chaos to bring hope to desperate places in working with other democracies under UN/US leadership to defeat enemies.

Because of his junior role in the Rural Affairs program in Vietnam, he obviously had little influence on that conflict, but the lessons he learned stayed with him until the end of his life, to the frustration of Obama and others who got tired of repeated references to the Vietnam experiences in dealing with more recent crises. He also had little impact on resolving the Afghanistan war because he was never given the scope of authority he thought he needed to try to deal with the Taliban in the broader context of the roles of Pakistan, Iran and India. In addition, if he had had the full authority he wanted (and had not died at the end of 2009), the author notes that the sheer magnitude of the issues might have defeated him.

His greatest achievement was to bring peace to the Bosnian Civil War. It was a perfect scenario for shuttle diplomacy and knocking heads together at Dayton. As an Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia in the Clinton Administration, an unsung achievement was putting together the international framework for dealing with refugees. As Ambassador to the UN, he succeeded in getting the US Congress to provide financial support that the UN desperately needed, and he also made important contributions as Ambassador to Germany.

He never achieved his goal of becoming Secretary of State. Despite his talents as a strategic thinker and practical doer, his aggressive self-promotion efforts and lack of antennae in personal relations led him to be disliked by many of his contemporaries, although he was signally successful in cultivating the more senior generation, exemplified by his relationship with Averell Harriman. Personal conflicts with Tony Lake, Barack Obama, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright and others held him back, although with the possible exception of Tony Lake none of his opponents come across positively in terms of their abilities in the diplomatic arena. In time, political leaders like the Clintons and others would get over the personal issues because they realized they needed his talents. In summing up Holbrooke, the author states that he had great egotism combined with great idealism which enabled him to accomplish real-world diplomatic achievements but also held him back in the bureaucracy and politics.

The book also gives a lot of attention to his business and personal life, including details on his three wives and several girlfriends, some of which get intimate.

PS: As indicated above, Holbrooke also approached Afghanistan as in many ways comparable to Vietnam. Others in the Obama Administration maintained it was different. But we have recently learned from the Washington Post that the US government routinely misled the public by "exaggerating" the progress in Afghanistan, which reminds one of the earlier war.

Very comprehensive and in depth saga of a very brilliant and challenging American. I learned a lot about the State Department's actions and dramas related to the Vietnam War, the Bosnian War and the war in Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke tried to have folks see that actions were being repeated and lessons not learned, but politics got in the way. He certainly gave it everything he had and it literally killed him. A very powerful story!

A thorough and gossipy biography of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Well written and dense, it was hard to put down and yet draining at times. I don't read much 20th-century history, so even though I lived through most of it, I learned a great deal about American foreign policy over the past 50 years, from Vietnam to Bosnia to Afghanistan. At times I was taken aback at how much Packer seems to dislike Holbrooke, not to mention Averell and Pam Harriman, Madeleine Albright, Peter Jennings, Clark Clifford, Christopher Warren, etc., etc., and he makes excellent arguments for why working with any of them would be a nightmare (or competing with your fellows to get their attention). These people "in the treetops" are awful to each other, have fake marriages, and only occasionally make the world a better place despite their PR. Anyway, highly recommended as an overview of American foreign policy and Washington's power scene over the past half century, but buckle your seat belt!

The first part of this story, about Holbrooke's early years in Vietnam, is fascinating. As the book lumbers on, though, Packer's injected "insights" become tiresome. It's rare for me to think a history book too opinionated. But Packer: let us think for ourselves, or at least try to back up your claims instead of sermonizing them. Oddly, the diplomacy around the Dayton Accords is sketchily explained. The book regains some of its appeal when discussing Holbrooke's decline, and his failures in Afghanistan. Holbrooke is an interesting character.

> If he had climbed to the height that he and his admirers hoped for, his death would have been followed by honored burial in the fixed and serene place that history reserved for him. If he had been like most of us, grief and memory would have stayed private. But in that unfinished space between, where the souls of the almost great clamor to be recognized, he was still struggling, striving, yearning for more.

Excellent. Packer’s account is balanced but fair. He doesn’t go easy on anyone.