Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2013
On Sale: May 21, 2013
448 pages ISBN: 0374102414 EAN: 9780374102418 Kindle: B00ANI9GIQ Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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.
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