NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES B ESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK AN
NPR BEST BOOK Selected by New York Times ' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book A
Washington Post Best Political Book A New Republic Best Book 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.
