PanHarpersGeorge Packer leaves little doubt that his biography is also an act of mourning ... This emotional register would be a natural one to adopt in an intimate memoir of a loved one, but in Packer’s hands it comes across as exhibitionistic bathos. Nowhere is this more evident than in Packer’s decision to insert himself into the book as its narrator and, further, to yoke this authorial \'I\' to a second-person-singular \'you\' to whom he addresses himself at crucial points, though the exact identity of this reader is something he never really makes clear ... There are many things wrong with this approach, but the first and most obvious is its breathtaking provinciality and self-absorption, which is not a little morally offensive, particularly in a writer whose cosmopolitanism is beyond dispute and who would certainly consider himself an internationalist. Perhaps Packer felt that the conventional biographer’s obligations did not apply to him ... Packer is content to sum up Holbrooke by deploying the fuzzy category of \'almost great\'—which, despite Packer’s attempts to flesh it out, ultimately obscures more than it clarifies ... There are not just more truthful but also more interesting ways of writing an obituary for the American Empire.
