The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer
National Book Award-winner, short-listed on just about everyone's "Best Non-Fiction of 2013," and my personal favorite book of the year, The Unwinding is a masterpiece that straddles several categories: journalism, history, politics and sociology.
From the review:
Brilliant. Harrowing. Gorgeously written. Read it. Now.
Loose, leisurely and lyrical, the book shines like a diamond. Packer, author of the lauded The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq published in 2006, takes his time to get to know a wide variety of Americans—from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Newt Gingrich and internet mogul Peter Thiel, to ordinary citizens struggling in dying cities in the Rust Belt and trying to forge new paths to entrepreneurship in the South.
It's a luscious blend of high art and narrative journalism at its finest.
The Unwinding is a lyrical requiem for a lost time, for downsized dreams and surrendered hopes. It's beautiful, as I said, at the outset of this review, but also … heartbreaking, a lush work of art that hurts all the more for being about the loss of hope and promise in America.
Jump below the fold for several more excellent entrants in the "Best Books I Read This Year" sweepstakes:
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher Hayes
An excellent, clear-eyed look at the failures of America's ruling classes that examines the build-up of the entrenched establishment and one that offers several avenues of what can be done to democratize it.
From the review:
Meritocracy. Meritocracy institutionalized, unquestioned and accepted as our underlying national ethos with no exceptions or examination.
There are various reasons why the "best and brightest" argument breaks down so quickly upon examination. Perhaps the most basic is that while the first generation of the chosen and meritable might be the smartest and the hardest-working, subsequent heirs are born with a huge institutional advantage—access to the best schools, the best test preparation services, immersed early in life in the upper class with its assumptions, advantages, connections and culture. And whether it's first-generation meritocracy or seventh, it still creates a problem for a democracy. "It is precisely our embrace of inequality," Hayes writes, "that has produced a cohort of socially distant, blinkered, and self-dealing elites."
A problem as bad as the initial inequality for entry to the ruling class is the fact that it works to strip our working and middle classes of its natural leaders. When there's a universal agreement that an Ivy League education, for example, is the ticket to the future, even noble efforts to funnel lower-income children into the great Ivy maw creates a disproportion, instills an acceptance of the idea that there's only one measure of success, and that it begins and ends with admission to elitedom, the earlier the better.
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This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America's Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich
Funny, brutally honest and eminently readable, This Town documents the ins and outs of the power game as played out in the Beltway.
From the review:
From the opening paragraphs of This Town, a frothy Beltway insider tell-all by New York Times Magazine writer Mark Leibovich, you know you're in for one of those reads that is equal parts riveting and horrifying, in which you compulsively keep reading even as you tell yourself it's nearly 400 pages of focus on ego, power, cash and trivia.
But is that all it is? Trivia? Well, it's certainly gossipy and (frankly, embarrassingly) rollicking fun and sharply written. And it certainly documents the trivial preoccupations of the preening class of politicians, media personalities who cover them, and lobbyists who attempt to sway them—the collective class Leibovich calls "the poli-media pigpen." But the bottom line is, these egomaniacs control our information flow and run our government. The fact that they are turbocharged with one-upmanship, starved for attention, single-mindedly devoted to advancing their personal "brand"—these facts are not trivial. And it's pretty damning that one of their own—a guy who freely admits he partakes of the same parties, funerals, bar mitzvahs and weddings as his co-horts—is turning over the rock and shining a light there for the rest of us.
This Town ultimately is a big, sprawling fun beach read of a book—snappy and well-crafted. It offers no solutions to the endless ego carnival of D.C., but it clearly sets out to be painstakingly descriptive rather than prescriptive. It succeeds marvelously, even if as a reader you feel a little guilty for enjoying the description so much. Mea culpa.
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The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper
Technically, The Outpost was published in November 2012, but most reviews (and my own personal reading schedule) placed it in 2013. A chronicle of one outpost and the troops who manned it over the years, the book is a painful look at the day-to-day lives—and deaths—of soldiers tasked with defending a ridiculously located and dangerous outpost in Afghanistan.
From the review:
The subtitle Jake Tapper chose for his book is one that legitimately salutes the incredible bravery and perseverance of America's troops in Afghanistan. But it could just as easily be subtitled the first sentence on the inside flap of the book: They never should have been there. Or, better yet: They deserved SO much better.
Tapper's book is a heartbreaking, detailed day-to-day account of several units assigned sequentially to one of the stupidest, most life-wasting assignments in all of a very understaffed war in an indefensible valley in a little explored region in a vastly under-researched country.
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The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
Another 2012 book I didn't get around to reading until it was released in paperback, The Oath is an engaging read for Supreme Court-watchers.
From the review:
In his latest book The Oath, Toobin looks at the the Supreme Court and the presidency, using the mirrored relationship between Chief Justice John Roberts and President Barack Obama as a prism through which the court confirmations of Sonya Sotomayer and Elena Kagan are viewed, along with recent cases and the ongoing struggle over "originalism," a major national ideological struggle that will shape our nation's future for decades.
Roberts and Obama have more in common in Toobin's interpretation than one would suspect from a cursory look from the outside. Both men are products of elite universities and their systems, both are believers in meritocracy, both rose to the top. But as we learn below the fold, the two men have stark differences as well.
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And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border by David Neiwert
A beautifully written and researched account of murder and right-wing extremism, And Hell Followed With Her explores the sick world of border vigilantism.
From the review:
One night that descended like grace in the Arizona desert in May 2009 was shattered for a Mexican-American family when a sociopathic female Minuteman/border vigilante wannabe named Shawna Forde masterminded a melodramatic break-in that ended in the death of Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia, in a remote border town called Arivaca.
Neiwert uses Shawna Forde's fascinatingly repugnant life story to discuss the wider aspects of the right-wing extremist movements he's spent his career documenting. He traces the Minuteman movement both backwards—from the earlier Ku Klux Klan to Aryan Nation to the militia movement prominent in the 1990s in the Northwest—and forward, to the Tea Party. That one murderous night in Arivaca gained national—and unwanted—attention for the border vigilante movement in general and the Minutemen in particular. Because, my God, in the end how easy it was for Forde to dupe her fellow travelers into believing that a low-key, locally accepted marijuana dealer was really some big-time head of an international drug cartel, and worthy of slaughter.
Neiwert's insights after covering right-wing extremism movements, his gift with language, his considerable storytelling skills all combine to make And Hell Followed With Her a near compulsive—and frightening—read. His ability to combine the history of these various organizations with the more immediate crime, and his analysis of the mindset of those who spent their lives immersed in the delusions of the right wing, make this book an important one, one with implications that reach far beyond one woman, two deaths and one border town.
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Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres by Patrick Randall, aka the Freeway Blogger
Yes, I'm a little prejudiced since I edited the book. But honestly, Take to the Hills is a an inspiring, quick read that lets readers know how easy it is, once you make up your mind, to make a difference in the world.
From the review:
Ladies and gentleman, I'd like to present Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres, an account of one of the Freeway Blogger's first direct actions, a thing of beauty, simplicity and adventure: Taking discarded clothing from the relatively affluent in America and delivering it directly to isolated villages in the mountains of Mexico.
His journey had three requisite elements of sustained direct action: It worked, it was simple, it was (dare we say it?) an adventurous blast to undertake. The book is equal parts philosophical, fun and inspiring.
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And now we open the floor to you, dear readers.
What were your favorite reads of the year? Tell us all about them! Surely we're all on the lookout for good choices for the book lovers on our gift lists. ...