Unwinding

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 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.

George Packer

Prologue PART I 1978 Dean Price Total War: Newt Gingrich Jeff Connaughton 1984 Tammy Thomas Her Own: Oprah Winfrey Jeff Connaughton 1987 Craftsman: Raymond Carver Dean Price Tammy Thomas Mr. Sam: Sam Walton 1994 Jeff Connaughton Silicon Valley 1999 Dean Price Tammy Thomas 2003 Institution Man (1): Colin Powell Jeff Connaughton PART II Dean Price Radish Queen: Alice Waters Tampa Silicon Valley 2008 Institution Man (2): Robert Rubin Jeff Connaughton Tammy Thomas Dean Price Just Business: Jay-Z Tampa PART III Jeff Connaughton 2010 Citizen Journalist: Andrew Breitbart Tampa Dean Price Tammy Thomas Tampa Prairie Populist: Elizabeth Warren Wall Street 2012 Silicon Valley Jeff Connaughton Tampa Tammy Thomas Dean Price A Note on Sources Acknowledgments