Kurzbeschreibung

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.

Beschreibung

America is in crisis. In the space of a generation, it has become more than ever 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 telling engaging human stories.

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 bitingly sharp biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs, capturing the year-by-year flow of events and the absurdity of the era's inspirational role models. 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.

A quiet, controlled anger suffuses the book - anger that a society has been allowed to come to this state, and that the institutions which helped to break it cannot be held to account by even the most well-meaning politician.

The Unwinding is an epic and very human portrait of the USA in these recent dark times.

Klappentext

A moving book on the USA in crisis, from the author of "The Assassin's Gate". Narrates the story of America over the past three decades, through the lives of half a dozen real characters.