This book will make you mad, make you despair, make you hate so many aspects of 21st-Century America, and it's about time. Without pulling any punches or bowing before any sacred altars, Packer outlines what the last three decades have done to America. It isn't pretty, but it is beautifully written.
It's hard to classify the book. Is it history, politics, journalism, economics? The answer, of course, is yes... to all. An illuminating read.
And in an unforeseen coincidence, Packer is married to Laura Secor, daughter of one of my professors in grad school at Penn State.
From the cover: 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 tells the story of the past three decades by journeying through the lives of several Americans, including a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money, and a Silicon Valley billionaire who arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these stories with sketches of public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
It's hard to classify the book. Is it history, politics, journalism, economics? The answer, of course, is yes... to all. An illuminating read.
And in an unforeseen coincidence, Packer is married to Laura Secor, daughter of one of my professors in grad school at Penn State.
From the cover: 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 tells the story of the past three decades by journeying through the lives of several Americans, including a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money, and a Silicon Valley billionaire who arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these stories with sketches of public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
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