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 …
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.
Schockierend und empfehlenswert zu lesen, um gewisse Entwicklungen in den USA besser zu verstehen.
Una colección de mini-biografías que se extienden desde finales de los 70 hasta 2012, algunas de personajes conocidos, otras de americanos víctimas de la degradación de las condiciones de la clase trabajadora. Muy bien escrito, describe perfectamente el espíritu de los tiempos: la desindustralización, los recortes sociales de Clinton, la burbuja inmobiliaria y la rendición de Obama ante sus culpables en un entorno de corrupción institucional y desesperanza.
This is a very well-done description, in stories, of what's changed in the US from the mid-50's or so. It neither glorifies that era, nor flinches from what made that era so different from our own.
The stories of people from Tammy, the black working-class mother in Youngstown Ohio, to Peter Theil, libertarian dot-com financier, are fascinating in their variety, and what the experiences of their lives tell us about what's happening now.
Yes, some of them made bad decisions, and others were lucky, but Packer makes clear the trend lines in our society, and the ways opportunity has shifted.
It is, however, completely journalistic, and devoid of much in the way of analysis or ideas for what might come next. The writing is a little uneven at times, but overall, it's worth a read.
An incredibly detailed and often engaging history of the last 40-50 years or so. It's also strangely dispassionate. I suppose the author is trying to present things how they actually occurred, using the collection of vignettes and stories to make a point, but it was different that a lot of other non-fiction, where the point is much more overt. I also suppose that it's strange that I'm complaining about a book being subtle and understated in much of its commentary. There are probably a lot of people who would think that's a good thing.
