George Packer's The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Coming This Month

The second of our two Peace Corps Writers at The New Yorker, George Packer (Togo 1982-83), has a book coming out at the end of May. Packer’s book is a massive study of some 432 pages that goes on sale for $27.00 on May 21, 2013.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing the book that, as they write, is: “A riveting examination of a nation in crisis.” The Unwinding: An inner History of the New America journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, and an evangelist for new economy in the rural South.

The narrative combines these intimate stories with biographical sketches of such figures as Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z. The book, according to FSG ” portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer relevant, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.”