The sinking era

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Reading The Sinking Age is like sitting in the front row at the midnight funeral of the American Dream. "It's a bleak snapshot of an era: frustrated efforts, betrayed trust, withering vitality, and fading hope. The powerful writing and vivid characters depict the vicissitudes of the United States over the past 30 years, and also write a thought-provoking prequel to the tragedy of today's social division." - Liu Qing, Professor at East China Normal University
☆ A new history of the inner world of American society that continues the timeline of "Glory and Dreams", an epic that defines our times☆ A book that tells the story of the shattered American dream over the past 30 years: the lives of four people, the pain of four classes, and the elegy of a generation's failure☆ Recommended by Xu Zhuoyun, Liu Qing, Zhou Lian, and Osiris, winner of the National Book Award, and named Book of the Year by over 20 institutions:
New York Times Book of the Year | NPR Best Books of the Year | Financial Times Best Books of the Year | Washington Post Best Political Books of the Year | The New Republic Best Books of the Year | Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year | Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of the Year | Apple iBooks Best Books of the Year | Amazon Best Books of the Year | Boston Globe Best Books of the Year...
☆Written by a senior writer of The New Yorker, this is the pinnacle of non-fiction in the new century and was selected by Slate as one of the 50 best non-fiction books in the past 25 years.
As if overnight, the world came crashing down. All old-fashioned rules and moral codes were thrown aside. Washington lobbyists outnumbered politicians. New York trading desks were free of taboos. Florida home prices plummeted. Steel mills closed in the Rust Belt. Farms in the South stopped growing tobacco. The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.
National Book Award winner George Packer follows four Americans born in the 1960s from different classes - a white Southern farmer pursuing the American dream, an African-American female worker who lost her factory job, an elite shuttling between Wall Street and Washington, and a Silicon Valley tycoon who made his fortune through the Internet economy - showing four ups and downs in life, uncovering the pain of four classes, and writing about the anger and sorrow of a generation.
This is the only generation of Americans whose lives are sinking: they were born in the golden age of post-war economic growth, and after struggling for half their lives, they witnessed the collapse of the traditional social structure.
Beyond the protagonists' stories, this book, like a cinematic lens, sweeps through the social transformations of the United States over the past three decades, painting a panoramic, flowing scroll weaving together culture, economy, and politics. The author offers biographies of politician Newt Gingrich, writer Raymond Carver, Walmart founder Sam Walton, and rapper Jay-Z, among others. Through these ten icons of the era, he reflects on ten different zeitgeists, some resonating, others sinking. He also chronicles the thousands of speculators lost in the real estate market, the tens of thousands of protesters who participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the tens of thousands of silent individuals struggling to survive, chronicling the shattered American dream over the past three decades.
Reading The Sinking Years is like sitting in the front row at the midnight funeral of the American Dream. It is a requiem for every American, and also a contemporary apocalypse about the turning point of an era and the dramatic changes in the world.
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George Packer points out that today's America is disintegrating. Familiar institutions of the past, such as small local banks, union halls, factories, churches, and various "clubs" of local activists engaged in social services, are gradually disappearing. America is divided not only by class, but also by groups, with individuals seeking their own identities and categories. Each group is striving for a better position. The disadvantaged within society are striving for complete personal freedom and equality. The consequence of this horizontal and vertical division is that America will ultimately be fragmented into many isolated and fragmented individuals. —Xu Zhuoyun, historian. This is a bleak snapshot of an era: frustrated efforts, betrayed trust, withering vitality, and fading hope. The powerful writing and vivid characters depict the profound changes in the United States over the past 30 years, and also provide a thought-provoking prequel to the tragedy of today's social divisions. —Liu Qing, professor at East China Normal University. "The Sinking Era" is somewhat similar to Huang Renyu's "The 15th Year of the Wanli Reign," attempting to capture a longer-term social transformation through a single decade. Parker, a senior writer for The New Yorker, skillfully interweaves the great and the small, taking into account both those who shape the times and those who are shaped (or destroyed) by them. — Fang Bolin, a scholar living in the United States. Like George Orwell's works, George Parker's writing carries a moral force. "The Sinking Years," a work so sweeping and powerful that everyone should read it. — David Grain, author of "Killers of the Flower Moon"
"The Sinking Years" is the extraordinary story of what has happened in our country over the past thirty years. George Packer has written a defining epic of our time that is wondrous, intimate, and authentic. —Dester Filkins, author of "Running in the Most Desperate City"
George Packer presents a history of our lives and times that captures with insight the America we have lost. —Lawrence Wright, author of Tower of Doom
Now, the hearts and lives shattered by the Second Great Depression have found an eloquent spokesman and fervent defender: George Packer. "The Sinking Years" is an American tragedy and a literary triumph. —David Frum, renowned American commentator. Original, sharp, brave, and vital. One of the best nonfiction works I've read in years. —Katherine Bu, author of "Underground"
George Packer writes a melancholic yet jazz-like requiem for America's post-World War II social contract. In this increasingly noisy and irrepressible land, you'll laugh and cry for those whose lives are increasingly silent and desperate. —David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize winner
Combining novelistic narrative with rigorous documentary reporting, George Packer tears open the broken cracks beneath the surface of America. Through the economic decline that has ravaged big cities and small towns, he examines bankers and Wall Street with a keen eye, while tracking the painful disintegration of much of our economic infrastructure. He accurately paints portraits of strivers and ordinary workers, and captures the rich, the ambitious, and even the notorious celebrities in a snapshot-like manner, vividly showing the widening gap between the rich and the common people. - National Book Award Speech A hundred years from now, the first book that can make people understand this era may be George Packer's "The Sinking Years", a landmark work that is both detailed and profound. - The Seattle Times
"A book, both ambitious and compassionate, offers a multifaceted look at America today. It's filled with a buzzing sense of pathos and anger, and offers a special sympathy for those caught in the cogs of a miscalibrated financial machine." —The New York Times
From Walt Whitman to John Dos Passos, from Norman Mailer and Updike to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, novelists and journalists have always found in the lives of ordinary Americans a tenacious and astute individualism, an unwavering faith in opportunity, and a way out of dark times. Parker offers a bleak picture of the state of our nation today, one that is both heartbreaking and accurate. He offers no false hope and no Hollywood endings, but he finds a strength in another kind of American creativity, in the stories of Raymond Carver and the portraits of Edward Hopper, in the dignity and the heart of the human being—a strength buried in muscle memory that rises when life falls apart and we feel alone. —The Washington Post
"The Sinking Age" is a nonfiction work that pushes narrative to its limits, reaching a rare level that is usually only achieved by fiction. It writes everything a great novel can write, but more specifically, it also completes what novels seem to no longer be willing to do - it is more interesting and more willing to experiment. The author Parker quickly changes the perspective and disrupts the narrative, trusting that readers will make their own judgments in the shocking parallel narratives. - "Esquire"
"The Sinking Years" is a lyrical requiem for a lost time, for dreams cut short and hopes subjugated. It's a captivating and heartbreaking book, a rich work of art that shows how all Americans suffer when they lose hope and promise. — Daily Kos
As a contributing writer for The New Yorker, George Packer is one of the best nonfiction writers in the United States. In terms of its sensitivity, "The Sinking Years" is more like a novel than a work of nonfiction. This book is more contagious. - Financial Times
A massive, highly original work of nonfiction that proves the future of journalism in this world is not bleak. Parker's writing is a steep adventure that makes people look up to him. - The New York Review of Books
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and Parker's brilliant narrative is like Dickens himself, condensing all of this history into one book for the first time. This book is about a wide range of people, rich and poor, who are caught in the constant storm of economic turmoil and social change. Everything around them is changing, and cherished things are being destroyed. Parker tells people's stories with a completely professional documentary style, but with more detail, more texture and, of course, more ambition than most contemporary American novels dare to do. - Los Angeles Times
Parker has an exceptionally clear and humane American voice, one that, in the tradition of nonfiction, allows ordinary lives to transcend the mundane. When our descendants examine the remains of this modern empire and sift through the cultural debris, this American voice will be a small treasure that endures. - The Independent
Beyond its subject matter, The Sinking Years is more like an experimental novel. Its scope, its reflection of the texture of contemporary life, and its inclusiveness of diverse ideas, from community organizers in Youngstown to liberal internet tycoons, will remind readers of the "American Trilogy" and Infinite Jest. A biographical article like the one about Powell wouldn't be out of place in The Paris Review, because this book isn't just about the truth; it's also filled with wisdom, irony, and astonishing imagination. — The Paris Review
Parker's narrative is literary, not prescriptive: he offers no policy proposals, nor does he seek the sublime. Like a great political novel, "The Sinking Years" reveals a problem with unprecedented clarity but leaves the reader to find the solution. But it is a story of resilience as well as despair. Parker's characters make decisions, good and bad, experience unexpected good and bad fortune, struggle to hold on, surrender to life, and then try harder. Their lives deserve to be told in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are so beautiful. —The Washington Monthly

2021-01-01

文汇出版社

New Classic Culture

520

9787549633425