American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic economic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. George Packer narrates the story of this America over the past three decades with his sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.
George Packer gilt als einer der besten Journalisten und Sachbuchautoren Amerikas. Er ist festes Mitglied der Redaktion des New Yorker und Autor mehrerer preisgekrönter Bücher. George Packer lebt in Brooklyn. Im Frühjahr 2014 war er Fellow an der renommierten American Academy in Berlin.
Über den Autor
George Packer
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Prologue
PART I
1978
Dean Price
Total War: Newt Gingrich
Jeff Connaughton
1984
Tammy Thomas
Her Own: Oprah Winfrey
Jeff Connaughton
1987
Craftsman: Raymond Carver
Dean Price
Tammy Thomas
Mr. Sam: Sam Walton
1994
Jeff Connaughton
Silicon Valley
1999
Dean Price Tammy Thomas 2003
Institution Man (1): Colin Powell
Jeff Connaughton
PART II
Dean Price
Radish Queen: Alice Waters
Tampa
Silicon Valley
2008
Institution Man (2): Robert Rubin
Jeff Connaughton
Tammy Thomas
Dean Price
Just Business: Jay-Z
Tampa
PART III
Jeff Connaughton
2010
Citizen Journalist: Andrew Breitbart
Tampa
Dean Price
Tammy Thomas
Tampa
Prairie Populist: Elizabeth Warren
Wall Street
2012
Silicon Valley
Jeff Connaughton
Tampa
Tammy Thomas
Dean Price
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Klappentext
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
AN NPR BEST BOOK
Selected by New York Times' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book
A Washington Post Best Political Book
A New Republic Best Book
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.
