The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America - George Packer

Written by George Packer
Read by Robert Fass
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

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. Includes bonus content read by the author.

18 hours and 4 minutes

Contents:

Prologue, read by the author

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

©2013 George Packer (P)2013 Macmillan Audio