Ebook: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

A New York Times* Bestseller
*One of the iTunes Bookstores Ten Books You Must Read This Summer

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 Internets significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the eras 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. Packers novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

Review

Praise for *The Unwinding:

[The Unwinding*] humswith sorrow, with outrage and with compassion . . . Packers gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term . . . [Packer has] written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece.
Dwight Garner, *The New York Times

*Gripping . . . deeply affecting . . .beautifully reported.
David Brooks,* The New York Times Book Review

[The Unwinding] has many of the qualities of an epic novel . . . [a] professional work of journalism that also happens to be more intimate and texturedand certainly more ambitiousthan most contemporary works of U.S. fiction dare to be . . . What distinguishes The Unwinding* is the fullness of Packers portraits, his willingness to show his subjects human desires and foibles, and to give each of his subjects a fully throated voice.
Hector Tobar, *The Los Angeles Times

*A work of prodigious, highly original reporting . . . [Packer] demonstrates that the future of reporting out in world isnt in eclipse. Packers arduous venture commands attention.
Joseph Lelyveld, *The New York Review of Books

*Wide ranging, deeply reported, historically grounded and ideologically restrained . . . Instead of compelling us to engage with his theory of the past 35 years of the American experience, Packer invites us to explore the experience itself, as lived by our fellow citizens. Theyre human beings, not evidence for an agenda or fodder for talking points. Understanding that is the first step toward reclaiming the nation we share with them.
Laura Miller, *Salon

[Packer is] among the best non-fiction writers in America . . . [he] weaves an unforgettable tapestry . . . In its sensibility, The Unwinding* is closer to a novel than a work of non-fiction. It is all the more powerful for it.
Edward Luce, *The Financial Times

Fascinating . . . elegant . . . A richly complex narrative brew.
The Chicago Tribune

[An] awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.
The Millions

A brilliant and innovative book that transcends journalism to become literature.
Bookforum

[S]uperbly written and consistently thought-provoking . . . The Unwindingis long-form journalism at its best.
Dallas News

Masterful . . . thoughtful, thorough, and persuasive . . . the payoff comes when Packers various elements combine in powerful and startling ways . . . What will stay with you . . . are the books people, people Packer never turns into ideological mascots, people who struggle to survive, to create, to improve, even as the systems of support erode around them.
The Christian Science Monitor

*Packer writes . . . beautifully and precisely; respectfully and, when warranted, critically. There is a straightforward and generous humanity in his prose.
Michael Tomasky, *The Daily Beast

Packers strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to marshal a diverse range of voices from across the class divide, in a nation deeply divided by social status.*
NPR Books.org

Exemplary journalism . . . A foundational document in the literature of the end of America.
Kirkus (starred review)

A broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis . . . an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope of recovery.
Booklist (starred review)

Trenchant . . . [the] brief biographies of seminal figures that shaped the current state of affairs offer the books fiercest prose, such as in Packers brutal takedown of Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury during some key 1990s financial deregulation that amplified the severity of the Great Recession of 2008. Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Unwinding. . . echoes the symphonic rage of the celebrated television seriesThe Wire . . . a tremendous work of reporting that pushes past abstractions and recycled debates . . . Whatever ones views on American decline generally, it is difficult to put the book down without . . . a conviction that we can do better. And yet if it is a story of despair, it is also a story of resilience. Packers subjects make good and bad decisions, enjoy lucky breaks and misfortune, eke it out, give in, and try harder. The lives they lead are worth describing in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are beautiful.
*The Washington Monthly

[A] sprawling, trenchant narrative . . . Packer is a thorough, insightful journalist, and his in-depth profiles provide a window into American life as a whole . . . The Unwindingis a harrowing and bracing panoramic look at American societythings are bad everywhere, for everyone, but theres still a sense of optimism. Through hard work and dedication we can pull ourselves out of the financial, political, and social mess weve created and become stronger as individuals and ultimately as a society.
The Brooklyn Rail

George Packer has crafted a unique, irresistible contraption of a book. Not since John Dos Passoss celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, which The Unwinding* recollects 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 postWorld 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 Prizewinning author of Freedom from Fear and *Over Here

The Unwinding *is the extraordinary story of whats 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 epicwondrous, bracing, and truethat 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 Leman, author of Redemption and *The Promised Land

*Original, incisive, courageous, and essential. One of the best works of nonfiction Ive read in years.
Katherine Boo, National Book Awardwinning 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 Prizewinning author of The Looming Tower and *Going Clear

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 Comeback and *Why Romney Lost

As with George Orwells, each of George Packers sentences carries a pulse of moral force. The Unwinding *is a sweeping and powerful book that everyone should read.
David Grann, author of *The Lost City of Z

*Praise for George Packer:

George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell . . . The places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality.
Jed Lipinski, The Village Voice

About the Author

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two other works of nonfiction, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and The Village of Waiting. His play, Betrayed, ran off-Broadway for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. His most recent book is Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade. He lives in Brooklyn.