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Wildland

The Making of America's Fury

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Wildland

By: Evan Osnos
Narrated by: Evan Osnos
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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents Wildland written and read by Evan Osnos.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

‘A sweeping and brilliant portrait’ GUARDIAN

‘A reportorial tour de force … Heart-rending, appalling and hard to put down’ JANE MAYER

‘Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure … Definitive’ AYAD AKHTAR

Evan Osnos moved to Washington, DC, in 2013 after a decade away from the United States. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments – the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault.

In search of an explanation for the crisis, he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich; in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg; and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them.

A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America’s psyche, two assaults on the country’s sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how it lost the moral confidence to see itself as larger than the sum of its parts.

©2021 Evan Osnos (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
Politics & Government Sociology United States West Virginia City

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Insightful and disturbing

Nuanced, sympathetic and insightful analysis of the social, economic and political environment in America that made Trump's rise possible.

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Wildland

This book successfully illustrates how America’s democracy is riven by social and economic disparities, such that it is teetering on becoming a failed state. However, where its narrative falls short is that is slavishly progressive and predictably virtuous.

Save yourself the time, watch half an hour of CNN or listen to some Hollywood type self-righteously prattle on about their topic du jour …. by doing so you will the gist of the book

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