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Last Best Hope
Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming injustices, paralyses, and divides How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities-feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new e...
Interesting Times
The 2013 National Book Award Winner A New York Times Bestseller Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history. Interesting Times unites brilliant investigative pieces such as "Betrayed," about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11, 2001 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror, Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few key themes recur: the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal. Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalachia to Obama, these essays hold a mirror up to our own troubled times and showcase Packer's unmistakable perspective, which is at once both wide-angled and humane.
Our Man
From one of America’s greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. **WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2019** **FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2020** Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. He was t...
The Unwinding
America is in crisis. In the space of a generation, it has become more than ever a country of winners and losers, as industries have failed, institutions have disappeared and the country's focus has shifted to idolise celebrity and wealth. George Packer narrates the story of America over the past three decades, bringing to the task his empathy with people facing difficult challenges, his sharp eye for detail and a gift for weaving together engaging narratives. The Unwinding moves deftly back and forth through the lives of its people, 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 industria...
The Assassins' Gate
Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, TheSan Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine. Winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs Winner of the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ...
Blood of the Liberals
The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer explores the ideals that shaped the lives of his forebears and describes his own struggle to carry on their tradition in our time, when large numbers of Americans have lost faith in politics.
Betrayed
Based on George Packer's account in The New Yorker, Betrayed is a riveting and morally complex drama that explores in the Iraqis' own words the ways in which we have already abandoned them. Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country's religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America's project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it by aiding the U.S. forces constitute a small minority. On a cold, wet night in January 2007, George Packer met two such Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, in central Baghdad to hear their story and those of other Iraqis working as translators an...
Wages of Rebellion
Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges -- who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class -- investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: p...
Narrative Essays
A wonderful selection of Orwell's finest narrative essays George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short non-fiction that reflected - and illuminated - the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. 'As soon as he began to write something,' comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, 'it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge - in short, to think - as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.' This collection charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as 'Shooting an Elephant' with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plain-spoken and brilliantly complex.
Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939
These years saw the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and Coming Up for Air. The most important document that has come to light regarding Orwell's Spanish experiences is the deposition charging him and Eileen with espionage and high treason, a charge unknown to them. This is fully analysed and can now be read in the context of the disputes that then divided the Left, well illustrated by the letters and documents printed here, notably his bitter response to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. The correspondence includes that with Yvonne Davet, who undertook the Translation of Orwell's books into French; George Kopp, Orwell's commandent in Spain; and a number of Ei...
