George Packer (Togo 1982-84) Writes About Boston in Current New Yorker

The April 29, 2013  issue of The New Yorker has a piece about Boston by George Packer (Togo 1982-83) in The Talk of the Town comment section. Packer writes about the city, its history, the Marathon, and the bombing.  He writes about how the spectators rushed to the scene, not away from it. “A man who had lost his own son in the Iraq War rushed a young man whose lower legs had been blown off to the tent, and so kept another father from losing his son.” He comments on the fact that Bostonians responded to the moment while our Senators in Washington, D.C. “cowered before the gun lobby and blocked passage of the most basic provisions–provisions supported by an overwhelming majority of the public–to diminish the gun violence to which more and more Americans, especially young men, are prone.”

If you don’t get The New Yorker, my guess is that you can read it on line. Packer has a new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, coming out in May from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Of Packer’s writings, Jed Lipinski of The Village Voice writes:  “George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell . . . The places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality.”
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