The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America - Couverture rigide

Packer, George

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0374102414 ISBN 13 : 9780374102418

Editeur : Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2013

Synopsis

Unusual book

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

'Original, incisive, courageous, and essential. One of the best works of nonfiction I've read in years.' --Katherine Boo, Samuel Johnson-prize shortlisted author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

'George Packer serves us the history of our own life and times in a magisterial look at the America we lost.' -- Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear

'The Unwinding is the extraordinary story of what s happened to our country over the past thirty years. George Packer gives us an intimate look into American lives that have been transformed by the dissolution of all the things that used to hold us together. The result is an epic wondrous, bracing, and true that will stand as the defining book of our time.' -- Dexter Filkins, author of The Forever War

'The Unwinding presents a big, gorgeous, sad, utterly absorbing panorama of the relentless breakdown of the American social compact over a generation. George Packer communicates the scope and the human experience of the enormous change that is his subject better than any writer has so far.' -- Nicholas Lemann, author of Redemption and The Promised Land

'The hearts and lives broken in this second great depression have now found their eloquent voice and fierce champion in George Packer. The Unwinding is an American tragedy and a literary triumph.' -- David Frum, author of Why Romney Lost and Patriots: A Novel

'George Packer has crafted a unique, irresistible contraption of a book. Not since John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, which The Unwindingrecollects and rivals, has a writer so cunningly plumbed the seething undercurrents of American life. The result is a sad but delicious, jazz-tempo requiem for the demise of the post-World War II American social contract. You will often laugh through your tears at these tales of lives of ever less quiet desperation in a land going ever more noisily berserk.' -- David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom From Fear and Over Here

.'As with George Orwell, each of Packer's sentences carries a pulse of moral force. This is a sweeping and powerful book that everyone should read.'

--David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

Présentation de l'éditeur

Just over a decade into the new millennium, America is beset by a sense of crisis. The seismic shifts that occurred in the space of a generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces. In The Unwinding, George Packer narrates the story of America over the past three decades, bringing to the task his empathy with people facing difficult challenges, his sharp eye for detail and a gift for weaving together engaging narratives.

The Unwinding moves deftly back and forth through the lives of half a dozen characters, 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 industrial Midwest trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington careerist; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire. The narrative alternates these intimately told stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs, capturing the year-by-year flow of events. The Unwinding portrays a superpower coming apart at the seams, its elites and institutions no longer working, leaving ordinary people to improvise their own schemes for salvation.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0374102414
• ISBN 13: 9780374102418
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 434