George Packer has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 22 ratings. The most-rated is Our Man.
Our Man
Summary
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory.... Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy.... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it." (Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review) "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." (David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe) Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: Its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
©2019 George Packer (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Unwinding
Summary
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2013 A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation. American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date. Includes bonus content read by the author.
©2013 George Packer (P)2013 Macmillan Audio
The Assassins' Gate
Summary
The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point? Rich in history and political insight, this is an important contribution to the ongoing dialogue over the Iraq War. George Packer describes the players and ideas behind the Bush administration's war policy. He also provides first-hand accounts of the men and women, both civilian and military, coalition and Iraqi, who are caught in the middle of the conflict. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award, George Packer is a venerated staff writer for The New Yorker with four tours on assignment in Iraq. With The Assassins' Gate, he offers a penetrating work of journalism.
©2005 George Packer (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Summary
Dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT is based on a dialectical view of the world. The dialectical perspective supports different aspects of the nature of reality and human behavior. The dialectic method supports as first aspect the fundamental interrelation and unity of reality, implying that the analysis of the single parts of a system is limited if they are not inserted in specific contexts, in which the behavior of individuals, and individuals in the group, are expressed. Dialectical behavior therapy has offered much in the realm of therapies. Dr. Linehan has saved thousands of lives with her innovative work. Borderline personality disorder is not being "crazy" or "unhinged". It's simply mental illness. It includes many other mental illnesses as facets of it. Because of that, it only makes sense that an effective therapy would include many types of therapy and self-reflection. Mindfulness is probably the most important aspect of DBT because we have been trained not to be mindful. We're like ants, scurrying around - hurry, hurry, hurry, but going nowhere. Mindfulness forces you to focus on the present. Ask yourself, "Am I treading water? Am I at the bottom of a rung I want to be on or the middle of one I don't?" When you choose mindfulness, you look at your life for a moment. Your questions aren't all going to be answered in one moment of mindfulness. It's something that must be practiced every day. DBT is an excellent medium for learning skills of mindfulness and interpersonal relationships. When therapy is complete, you've acquired an outstanding toolkit of skills to reach for in any situation. This book gives a comprehensive guide on the following: What is DBT? DBT Stages and G
©2019 Brandon Travis (P)2019 Brandon Travis
Last Best Hope
Summary
This program is read by the author. Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities - feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end. Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind ; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. At a time when many fear that the American experiment in self-government may collapse, or, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “die by suicide,” Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain American democracy. To point a better way forward, he looks back at previous eras of crisis to discover the resources for invigorating self-government. Combining trenchant social analysis with a vibrant and stinging essayistic voice and a deep knowledge of America’s past and present, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national self-examination the times demand. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
©2021 George Packer (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
Blood of the Liberals
Summary
An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history. George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century - an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely - and ultimately, fatally - tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
©2000 George Packer (P)2018 Random House Audio