Wildland

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

  • A sweeping and brilliant portrait of a people subjected to fifty years of rightwing aggression . . . The most personal and the most powerful description yet . . . My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all

    Guardian

  • Stellar reporting . . . As an overview of a fractious ideological landscape, this skillful treatment is hard to beat. An elegant survey of the causes and effects of polarization in America

    Kirkus (starred review)

  • Incisive . . . An engrossing and revealing look at how deeply connected yet far apart Americans are

    Publisher's Weekly

  • A reportorial tour de force . . . Osnos paints an indelible picture that is heart-rending, appalling and hard to put down

    ' Jane Mayer, chief Washington correspondent for the New Yorker and author of DARK MONEY

  • Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure, Wildland brilliantly transmutes our national chaos into absorbing narrative order. Evan Osnos has penned a definitive portrait of what we have allowed ourselves to become: a nation reaping the harvest that long negligence has sown

    Ayad Akhtar, author of HOMELAND ELEGIES

  • In this richly reported, beautifully written book, Evan Osnos chronicles two decades of American anger, fury, and political dysfunction . . . A riveting tale of dark times, told with a pathos and humanity that prompts hope of something better

    Michael J. Sandel, author of THE TYRANNY OF MERIT

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