George Packer

Journalist and novelist George Packer. Packer grew up in a family with a very strong liberal tradition; his grandfather was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century. His father was a Jewish Kennedy-era liberal who was a professor at Stanford. His new book, the Blood of the Liberals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a memoir about his family’s liberalism and Packer’s own coming to terms with it. He looks at the history of liberalism in America, and the clashes it caused in his own family.

Writer George Packer. Packer's new novel, "The Half Man," is the story of a Western journalist caught in the turmoil of a fictitious Pacific Asian country. In real life, Packer spent two years with the Peace Corps in Togo, and that experience helped shape this book. (It's published by Random House).