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The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer

You need to read this book. I'm sure you are concerned about what has happened to the working and middle class in America, and Packer, through the journeys of a steel worker, a tobacco farmer-turned-bio-diesel entrepreneur, a Washington insider waffling between the lure of big money and idealism, and the larger pictures of Florida's real estate collapse and the rise of Silicon Valley presents a picture of the last three decades that all parties and affiliations would be unwise to ignore. This book needs to be read, to be discussed, to be argued over so that we can come together and figure out where we go from here. Read it! If I could choose one non-fiction book for everyone who is concerned about what is going on, from the ineffectiveness of our political system to the breakdown of our middle class, no matter party affiliation, it would be this one. We won't all agree, but it certainly would encourage discussion. - Linda

"If George R.R. Martin wrote a history of American neoliberalism in the style of The Song of Ice and Fire, it would be The Unwinding. The Lannisters got bailed out and the small folks still get screwed." - Flip Tanedo, Assistant Professor, UC Riverside

"As with George Orwell's, each of George Packer's sentences carries a pulse of mental force. The Unwinding is a sweeping and powerful book that everyone should read." - David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

George Packer is a staff writer for the The New Yorker and the author of The Assassin's 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. 

If you liked The Unwinding, try: Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank

For those of you with a decidedly more liberal bent, I strongly suggest Listen, Liberal. Frank hits those of us (progressives, liberals, democrats, whatever name you'd like to give yourself) square in our faltering ideology. This one hurts, but if we are able to rethink who we are and for whom we stand, we need to think about what Frank throws at us here. The beauty of looking at what we've done to bring us to the crisis is that we can change that part of the equation. Frank holds up the mirror and gives us the opportunity to give ourselves a facelift... and oh, that has such different connotations now. - Linda