George Packer's 2013 masterful portrait of a superpower coming apart at the seams - the book that gave voice and perspective to the discontent that would enfranchise Donald Trump
George Packer is a staff writer for the Atlantic and a former staff writer for the New Yorker. He is the author of The Unwinding- Thirty Years of American Decline, which was a New York Times bestseller and won a National Book Award. His other nonfiction books include The Assassins' Gate- America in Iraq, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and Our Man- Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, which won the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He has also written two novels, The Half Man and Central Square. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Packer's is an American voice of exceptional clarity and humanity
in a tradition of reportage that renders the quotidian
extraordinary. When our descendants survey the ruins of this modern
imperium and sift its cultural detritus, American voices like this
will be the tiny treasures that endure.
*Independent*
The historic scope of Packer's book - from the late-Seventies
economic downturn right up to the recent Occupy Wall Street
protests - is as impressive as its immense ambition and its
cumulative narrative power... A Great American Novel in the guise
of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks us...that daunting,
unsettling question: do we truly like the world we have made for
ourselves?
*The Times*
Epic, sad and unsettling history of the last four decades in the
US... It is a testament to Packer's talents that The Unwinding is
powerful, rather than off-puttingly earnest or just depressing, and
that it lingers so long after reading. The sense of loneliness - of
isolated souls, failed by their institutions, pummelled by the
forces of big money - seems to seep under your skin, and to stay
there.
*Guardian*
Packer is among the best non-fiction writers in America... In its
sensibility, The Unwinding is closer to a novel than a work of
fiction. It is all the more powerful for it.
*Financial Times*
Original, incisive, courageous, and essential. One of the best
works of non-fiction I've read in years
*Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers*
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