"Richard Holbrooke: Kennedy Democrat The savior of Sarajevo believed that American power should be used for good." from the Wall Street Journal by FOUAD AJAMI

Richard Holbrooke, who died this week at age 69, loved epigraphs. They are strewn all over his writings—poems and passages from Euripides, W.H. Auden, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, the diplomatist and historian Harold Nicolson. An epigraph from Herman Melville turns up early in Holbrooke's remarkable chronicle of his experience in the Balkans, "To End a War" (1998). "With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." Holbrooke lived the life of his choice, driven by that itch. The Holbrooke story could have ended in the Mekong Delta, where as a young man he served as "pacification adviser." He could have perished, as three of his colleagues traveling with him did, in the summer of 1995, on the treacherous Mount Igman road to Sarajevo. Mr. Ajami is a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

See that article here. The other day, the Dutch newspaper, DeVerdieping Trouw wrote this [a translation from its original dutch:

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993 he returned to government and government, first as ambassador to Germany and then in Washington as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. In 1996, Holbrooke at his own request relieved from that post because he wanted to spend more time on his marriage to writer Kati Marton, his third wife. He married her in 1995, the year of 'Dayton'. About his role as architect of the peace treaty he wrote the book "To End a War." In the aftermath claimed the former political leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, the ICTY last year that Holbrooke him in exchange for his departure from politics was promised immunity from prosecution. The diplomat denied that strongly.

See that Dutch article, here. See also: No Man's Land, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia

Freedom Frenzy: A Look at Presidential Reading Lists from National Review Online

If you look at President Obama’s reading list over the years, it has a clear ideological tilt. He has read a host of books by such liberal authors as Thomas Friedman, but precious few books by conservative ones. Bush, on the other hand, often mixed liberal authors, including Kurlansky and even Camus, in with his Natan Sharansky (The Case for Democracy) and Eliot Cohen (Supreme Command). In this, Obama the reader is very much like Obama the politician. According to a story Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.) tells in the new book, Young Guns, Obama dismissed conservative ideas by telling Cantor that the election was over and “I won.” Perhaps Obama should reconsider this approach, if not in politics then at least when it comes to his library. Reading conservative authors is a low-cost way to demonstrate outreach to the other side of the aisle in our far-too polarized society. And who knows? It might even serve reading’s original purpose -- he might learn something.

In the vein of combing through really great reviews and articles that are rich in cross references out to other great reads, this quick article hooks with all of the hoopla over Freedom. It's not about that, obviously. There are probably 6 good titles in that article, definitely worth reading.