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Wildland: The Making of America's Fury Hardcover – September 14, 2021
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
After a decade abroad, the National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States―Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL―to illuminate the origins of America’s political fury.
Evan Osnos moved to Washington, D.C., in 2013 after a decade away from the United States, first reporting from the Middle East before becoming the Beijing bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune and then the China correspondent for The New Yorker. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault.
In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020―a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil―he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. 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. As Wildland weaves in and out of these personal stories, events in Washington occasionally intrude, like flames licking up on the horizon.
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 U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities and across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how we lost the moral confidence to see ourselves as larger than the sum of our parts.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateSeptember 14, 2021
- Dimensions6.37 x 1.49 x 9.27 inches
- ISBN-100374286671
- ISBN-13978-0374286675
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Praise for Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Stellar reporting . . . As an overview of a fractious ideological landscape, this skillful treatment is hard to beat. An elegant survey of the causes and effects of polarization in America." ―Kirkus (starred review)
“Through clear, engrossing writing, [Evan Osnos] gives shape to the past 20 years.” ―Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune
"Incisive . . . An engrossing and revealing look at how deeply connected yet far apart Americans are." ―Publishers Weekly
"A sprawling, fascinating journey through the dawning decades of the 21st century . . . through acute observation, extensive interviewing and dogged research, Osnos weaves an intricate tapestry that gradually reveals how Americans experienced the last two decades." ―Lizabeth Cohen, The Washington Post
"What makes Wildland such a fine book is not just the sense of divorcement he brings from his interlude abroad but the skills Osnos learned earlier in his career as a local reporter. It is a tour de force of old-style, shoe-leather reportage . . . Wildland tells the now familiar story of American polarization in an illuminating and often revelatory way." ―Nick Bryant, Foreign Policy
"One of the books of the year . . . Wildland by The New Yorker's Evan Osnos draws the backstory to America's rage through deep reporting and 'thousands of hours of conversations' in three places he lived before D.C." ―Axios
"A book rich with local history, sociological data and detailed portraits of people from various walks of life . . . It may be the plain facts assembled in Wildland that are needed, more than any encapsulating argument, to penetrate the apathy and nostalgia of the nation’s moderates―and offer a more productive channel to some of the furious.” ―Louis Amis, The Times Literary Supplement
"Osnos offers the most personal and the most powerful description yet of a country 'so far out of balance that it [has] lost its center of gravity' . . . My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all." ―Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
“Diligent and deeply researched . . . Osnos offers intimate portraits of the men and women in the three communities on his radar . . . Wildland is written in first person, which often gives the book a satisfying immediacy . . . Osnos himself seems too driven, too idealistic to give up on the America that he once promoted on his travels abroad. But as he makes painfully clear in Wildland, the underbrush is still parched, and a mere ember could set it ablaze.” ―James S. Hirsch, Boston Globe
"The title of Evan Osnos' fine book, Wildland, is also its guiding metaphor. Wildland is land so desiccated that a spark can turn it into an uncontrollable wildfire. Even if the danger is known, a spark will eventually come, and then the conflagration." ―Angus Deaton, The New York Times Book Review
"Evan Osnos' Wildland is a reportorial tour de force, describing the kaleidoscopic changes that threaten to cause America to come apart at the seams. He deftly connects the dots between the hedge-fund billionaires of Greenwich, Connecticut, the opioid-soaked towns of Appalachia, and the gun-heavy gangs of Chicago. By turning his trained eye as a former foreign correspondent on his own country, Osnos paints an indelible picture that is heart-rending, appalling and hard to put down." ―Jane Mayer, chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
"Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure, Wildland brilliantly transmutes our national chaos into absorbing narrative order. Evan Osnos has penned a definitive portrait of what we have allowed ourselves to become: a nation reaping the harvest that long negligence has sown." ―Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
“In this richly reported, beautifully written book, Evan Osnos chronicles two decades of American anger, fury, and political dysfunction. He shows how, from the 9/11 attacks to the January 6th siege of the Capitol, a culture of fear and greed has taken hold, leading to endless war, pervasive mistrust, and the unravelling of the civic project. Osnos gives us a riveting tale of dark times, told with a pathos and humanity that prompts hope of something better.” ―Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 14, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374286671
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374286675
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.37 x 1.49 x 9.27 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #290,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #282 in Sociology of Class
- #639 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- #707 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the China correspondent from 2008 to 2013. He is the winner of two Overseas Press Club awards and the Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia. Previously, he worked at the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2008. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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It is a book, in his own words, about tying ‘together the disparate experiences of being American, to determine how the course of lives intersected in ways we often overlooked in the disorientating rush of those twenty years’. One of those intersections involves his meeting with Maurice ‘Reese’ Clark who Osnos met at the funeral of a gangland victim in Chicago. Years later, Clark was still in touch with Osnos and reported the drama unfolding around the death of George Floyd. Clark gave an account of how much his neighbourhood had changed in the past twenty years – for the worse.
In this book, Osnos returned to the three places in the US that he had lived – Chicago, Illinois; Clarkesburg, West Virginia; and Greenwich, Connecticut. One of the themes of this book is about how America lost the talent for ‘the rational approach, reason, the meeting of minds in honourable agreement after open argument’.
Osnos book traces and pins much of the blame for America’s decline in moral character squarely on Donald Trump. To be fair, there was a host of similar personalities who share in the blame, people like J William Middendorf II who Osnos writes about in his chapter, ‘Buying Power’ – the corruption of the lobbyist nation. And where coal mine closures are concerned, even Obama has been blamed.
This is a very personal account of what is happening in America today; how it came to be like this in the span of twenty years. The book concludes with Joe Biden’s presidency, one that landed right in the Covid-19 pandemic. It could not have been a worse time for a new President, but he holds the hope that there are enough Americans to remake their land into something good. And this might be the worst of times, but it might also be the best of times.
Trump came close to destroying America and it looks as the eagerness to bury Biden will succeed and Trump will be back to finish us off.
This book is brilliantly conceived and tying diverse lives together in ways that none of them could know because they don't know one another.
It shows that the rich were ready to run but somehow discovered that they were safe because Trump's goal was to be one of them.
It may not have been the authors intention but he's laid out the plan for the "death of America" (by Pat Buchanan).
On a personal note, I know Clarksburg. I drove through it repeatedly in the late 60's and early 70's. I know West Virginia in general because I lived next door in Maryland and later in Parkersburg. Osnos does a good job of putting his finger on the pulse of the state. Rare to find an author who really knows WV.
By going back to three geographical locations that impacted his life, he tells as complete a story as I've seen. From his immigrant Jewish great-grandparents life in Chicago in the early 1900s, through his early journalism career in Clarksburg, West VA, to spending his formative years in Greenwich, Ct., and being witness to the shift from merely rich CEOs and money men, to the age of the hedge fund titans and banking rouges. It's an amazing journey, and he makes it crystal clear that it didn't have to be this way.
I started out with the local library's copy, but felt so compelled to underline and highlight, I bought my own copy. This will permanently reside in the history section of my personal library.
Top reviews from other countries
Highly recommend it.







