'Portrait of a nation in crisis' - This was the scroll under a great interview with George Packer

on France 24 TV here in France. Really first-rate!

He's the author of:

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pp., $27.00


Joel Sternfeld: Wet ’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida, September 1980

"His dialectic works like this: every so often—a couple of times a century, it seems—American society unravels, ripping ties that bind communities, families, and individuals, leaving them mostly in free fall, except for self-seekers and climbers who manage to hang on and find higher and higher handholds.

Such dislocations are his eponymous “unwindings,” the most recent of which—not yet ended, according to this vision—started in this country at some point in the 1970s. “The future had been in decline ever since 1973,” he writes, paraphrasing one of the real-life characters he advances as representative voices, if not archetypes, of our era."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/george-packer-inside-our-new-america/

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I need to find and read this book.