RaveNew York Review of BooksAmerican Prometheus is clear in its purpose, deeply felt, persuasively argued, disciplined in form, and written with a sustained literary power. It is still recognizably Sherwin’s book, giving new emphasis to arguments first made in A World Destroyed, but at the same time Bird has brought freshness and clarity along with some interpretive ideas of his own.
George Packer
RaveThe New York Review of BooksIt’s Packer’s book, so it must be him—but the voice is not quite 100 percent Packer’s. This prologue is a risky start. Its writer doesn’t cite anything that Packer in his diligence has not learned for himself, but he knows it the way a guy at the next desk, or an early boss, or a sometime rival for a big job might know it. We may think of this writer—this narrator—as the kind of person, perhaps even a composite of all the people, who told Packer what he knows ... Holbrooke was not without blemish. He could be abrupt, dismissive, vain, and self-absorbed. Packer is frank about all that but remains in thrall. His Holbrooke is a man who wins, who holds and returns regard ... Packer’s hundred pages on the American failure in Vietnam tell the story as forcefully as any hundred pages ever written about the war ... No book could achieve the intensity, completeness, and narrative depth of Our Man without the author’s belief that he had been put on this earth to do it. The strength of the book is its focus on Holbrooke’s character, which Packer pursues much as James Boswell pursued the human truth of Samuel Johnson.
Daniel Ellsberg
RaveThe New York Review of BooksEllsberg writes briskly in the service of opinions formed by long and sober study. What he means is never in doubt and it is always interesting ... This is not a young man’s argument, assured and confident. It is an old man’s warning, the fruit of long reflection and tinged with sorrow, as clear as he can make it: these weapons are too dangerous to have because they are too dangerous to use.
