Wildland : The Making of America's Fury

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.