Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526635488

Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a CNN contributor, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Based in Washington D.C., he writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was the China Correspondent at The New Yorker from 2008 to 2013. His first book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the 2014 National Book award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2020, he published the international bestseller, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, based on interviews with Biden, Barack Obama, and others. Prior to The New Yorker, Osnos worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Before his appointment in China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq. He and his wife, Sarabeth Berman, have two children.

Reviews for Wildland

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author of this interesting book is a writer for New Yorker magazine who lived overseas from 2001 to 2013. When he returned to the US, he found the country to be very different from the one he left, and wanted to know why. He chose three places he was intimately connected with, Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he began his journalism career, and Chicago, Illinois, where his family is from. Over the next several years, he visited these places many times and interviewed and got to know many people there. This book is the result of his reporting.In Clarksburg, he found members of the white working class and poor. There, he investigated what was gained and what was lost, "when some of America's wealthiest people tapped the natural resources beneath the homes of some of America's poorest people."In Chicago, he focused primarily on the black urban poor, "to understand the compounded effects of American segregation."And in Greenwich, he found representatives of America's wealthiest--the top .001%, including many hedge fund managers. He sought "to learn how a gospel of economic liberty had altered beliefs among leaders of America's capitalism, and made anything possible, for the right price."The book covers a lot of the defining events of the last 20 years or so through these lenses, and it goes a long way towards showing how the current deep divisions in our society developed and how deeply entrenched these divisions now are. He concludes that the time between 2001 and 1-6-2021, "was a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the union as larger than the sum of its parts."The conclusion he draws is not good: "If America's history is a story of constant rebalancing--between greed and generosity, industry and nature, identity and assimilation--then the country had spun so far out of balance that it had lost its center of gravity."There is a lot to think about in this book. It reminded me of The Unwinding by George Packer, still a worthwhile read, although several years old.Recommended.4 stars