The Unwinding

"George Packer has crafted a unique, irresistible contraption of a book. Not since John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, which The Unwinding recollects and rivals, has a writer so cunningly plumbed the seething undercurrents of American life. The result is a sad but delicious jazz-tempo requiem for the post–World War II American social contract. You will often laugh through your tears at these tales of lives of ever-less-quiet desperation in a land going ever-more-noisily berserk."—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear and Over Here

"The Unwinding is the extraordinary story of what's happened to our country over the past thirty years. George Packer gives us an intimate look into American lives that have been transformed by the dissolution of all the things that used to hold us together. The result is an epic—wondrous, bracing, and true—that will stand as the defining book of our time."—Dexter Filkins, author of The Forever War

"The Unwinding presents a big, gorgeous, sad, utterly absorbing panorama of the relentless breakdown of the American social compact over a generation. George Packer communicates the scope and the human experience of the enormous change that is his subject better than any writer has so far."—Nicholas Leman, author of Redemption and The Promised Land

"Original, incisive, courageous, and essential. One of the best works of nonfiction I've read in years."
—Katherine Boo, National Book Award–winning author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

"George Packer serves us the history of our own life and times in a magisterial look at the America we lost."—Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear

"The hearts and lives broken in this second great depression have now found their eloquent voice and fierce champion in George Packer. The Unwinding is an American tragedy and a literary triumph."
—David Frum, author of Comeback and Why Romney Lost

"As with George Orwell's, each of George Packer's sentences carries a pulse of moral force. The Unwinding is a sweeping and powerful book that everyone should read."—David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z


[The Unwinding] hums—with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion . . . Packer's gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term . . . [Packer has] written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[The Unwinding] has many of the qualities of an epic novel . . . [a] professional work of journalism that also happens to be more intimate and textured—and certainly more ambitious—than most contemporary works of U.S. fiction dare to be . . . What distinguishes The Unwinding is the fullness of Packer's portraits, his willingness to show his subjects' human desires and foibles, and to give each of his subjects a fully throated voice."—Hector Tobar, The Los Angeles Times

"A work of prodigious, highly original reporting . . . [Packer] demonstrates that the future of reporting out in world isn't in eclipse. Packer's arduous venture commands attention."—Joseph Lelyveld, The New York Review of Books

"Wide ranging, deeply reported, historically grounded and ideologically restrained . . . Instead of compelling us to engage with his theory of the past 35 years of the American experience, Packer invites us to explore the experience itself, as lived by our fellow citizens. They're human beings, not evidence for an agenda or fodder for talking points. Understanding that is the first step toward reclaiming the nation we share with them."—Laura Miller, Salon

"Fascinating . . . elegant . . . A richly complex narrative brew."—The Chicago Tribune

"[An] awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul."—The Millions

"A brilliant and innovative book that transcends journalism to become literature."—Bookforum

"[S]uperbly written and consistently thought-provoking . . . The Unwinding is long-form journalism at its best."—Dallas News

"Masterful . . . thoughtful, thorough, and persuasive . . . the payoff comes when Packer's various elements combine in powerful and startling ways . . . What will stay with you . . . are the book's people, people Packer never turns into ideological mascots, people who struggle to survive, to create, to improve, even as the systems of support erode around them."—The Christian Science Monitor

"Packer writes . . . beautifully and precisely; respectfully and, when warranted, critically. There is a straightforward and generous humanity in his prose."—Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

"Packer's strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to marshal a diverse range of voices from across the class divide, in a nation deeply divided by social status." —NPR Books.org

"The Unwinding . . . echoes the symphonic rage of the celebrated television series The Wire . . . a tremendous work of reporting that pushes past abstractions and recycled debates . . . Whatever one's views on American decline generally, it is difficult to put the book down without . . . a conviction that we can do better. And yet if it is a story of despair, it is also a story of resilience. Packer's subjects make good and bad decisions, enjoy lucky breaks and misfortune, eke it out, give in, and try harder. The lives they lead are worth describing in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are beautiful."—The Washington Monthly

"[A] sprawling, trenchant narrative . . . Packer is a thorough, insightful journalist, and his in-depth profiles provide a window into American life as a whole . . . The Unwinding is a harrowing and bracing panoramic look at American society—things are bad everywhere, for everyone, but there's still a sense of optimism. Through hard work and dedication we can pull ourselves out of the financial, political, and social mess we've created and become stronger as individuals and ultimately as a society."—The Brooklyn Rail

"George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell . . . The places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality." —Jed Lipinski, The Village Voice

"Exemplary journalism . . . A foundational document in the literature of the end of America."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis . . . an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope of recovery."—Booklist (starred review)

"Trenchant . . . [the] brief biographies of seminal figures that shaped the current state of affairs offer the book's fiercest prose, such as in Packer's brutal takedown of Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury during some key 1990s financial deregulation that amplified the severity of the Great Recession of 2008. Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)