Wildland describes the many ways Americans lost faith in their government and society, becoming a tinderbox waiting for the arsonist Donald Trump. It begans with the attack on 9/11/2001 and continues to the insurrection on 1/6/2021, looking at the many changes that happened during those twenty years that made us all so mad at the world.

Osnos can claim both the and outsider perspective. He writes about places he lived and worked, but he spent twelve years working in China so many of the changes that may be imperceptible as they happened were jarring to come home to. He set out to find out how and why we changed so much and why so many of us have given up on the common good.

Drawing on his lived experience in Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois as well as interviews with people from there, he is able to go deeply into the emotional landscape while mapping the socioeconomic environmental changes. During this time, inequality increased. A few became incomprehensibly wealthy while nearly everyone else lost ground. The expectation that the next generation will do better than the last has been lost, not for one, but for two generations. People have a right to be angry.

While Wildland is fascinating, well-researched, and well-written, I think Evan Olnos misses the main driver of anger today. He mentions racism and even notes that the birthrate of nonwhite babies outpaces white babies by a bit. But perhaps because racism was there in 2001 and is still here in 2021, he underestimates its effect. Economic conditions do not explain why people without health insurance oppose reforms that would insure them and safeguard their health, but white supremacy is so powerful that people would rather be poor than equal.

It’s not that Olnos ignores racism but he consistently underestimates its power. The word racism appears only seventeen times in a 430-page book and eighteen for racist. And yes, all the other trends contibute to our problems, the loss of local news, the weakening of labor, the gloridication og greed to the point Gordan Gecko becomes the hero. But all of that would not be enough without racism. For Olnos, racism is primarily expressed through anti-immigrant sentiment easily exploited by Trump, but that is less enduring and less virulent than the anti-Black racism expressed through opposition to democracy itself. The claim that Biden lost is rooted in the deeply held belief that Black voters are not as legitimate as white voters. It is why we shrug at 12-hour lines to vote and why the GOP can sustain absolute oppositing to voting rights. White people believe in democracy so long as they make the decisions, the very thought of losing their absolute hegemony sends them into an insurrectionist rage.

Every point Olnos makes is valid, but he miss the point. Racism is the lever through which class oppression is able to move mountains. White people would rather be poor than equal. Class analysis will only take us so far, if we do not grapple with white supremacy first and foremost, there is no permanent progress. For that reason, although again and again, I was moved by and agreed with Olnos chapter by chapter, I was also infuriated by the absence of reckoning honestly with the power of white supremacy.

I received an e-galley of Wildland from the publisher through NetGalley

Wildland at Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Macmillan
Evan Osnos author site
Essay at Harvard Gazette

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/17/9780374286675/ ( )

The author of this interesting book is a writer for New Yorker magazine who lived overseas from 2001 to 2013. When he returned to the US, he found the country to be very different from the one he left, and wanted to know why. He chose three places he was intimately connected with, Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he began his journalism career, and Chicago, Illinois, where his family is from. Over the next several years, he visited these places many times and interviewed and got to know many people there. This book is the result of his reporting.

In Clarksburg, he found members of the white working class and poor. There, he investigated what was gained and what was lost, "when some of America's wealthiest people tapped the natural resources beneath the homes of some of America's poorest people."

In Chicago, he focused primarily on the black urban poor, "to understand the compounded effects of American segregation."

And in Greenwich, he found representatives of America's wealthiest--the top .001%, including many hedge fund managers. He sought "to learn how a gospel of economic liberty had altered beliefs among leaders of America's capitalism, and made anything possible, for the right price."

The book covers a lot of the defining events of the last 20 years or so through these lenses, and it goes a long way towards showing how the current deep divisions in our society developed and how deeply entrenched these divisions now are. He concludes that the time between 2001 and 1-6-2021, "was a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the union as larger than the sum of its parts."

The conclusion he draws is not good: "If America's history is a story of constant rebalancing--between greed and generosity, industry and nature, identity and assimilation--then the country had spun so far out of balance that it had lost its center of gravity."

There is a lot to think about in this book. It reminded me of The Unwinding by George Packer, still a worthwhile read, although several years old.

Recommended.
4 stars ( )

USA, Journalism ( )

There's a lot to process here. It's a big book and it pulls together a huge number of threads into a more-or-less cohesive analysis. It's valuable to learn the history of our current precarious moment, and it's important that the author tells stories of regular people and allows them to express their own opinions and perspectives. I'm not sure how much I actually got out of this. I learned some new details and perhaps gained some insights, but I'm not sure what is actionable, other than that we need to really listen to each other with respect and open hearts and minds. That's not really a unique prescription (and it is, of course, very difficult), but I suppose a reminder is helpful. Still, if you're unfamiliar with the background of economic precarity and inequality, rising nativism and nationalism, and the authoritarian and anti-democratic turn of the Republican party, this book is a great summation of all that recent history, right up to the January 6 2001 insurrection. ( )

Evan Osnos' Wildland is a fascinating and illuminating look at the political fury of Americans in the first decades of the 21st century. This book builds slowly but powerfully as Osnos reviews the different strands of American life - the deepening divide of economic inequality, unequal access to medical care, racial injustice, drugs and gun violence - that have torn at ordinary Americans over the last 20 years and built up into the fury of the Trump years.

Osnos, a reporter for the New Yorker, returned to America in 2013 after spending a number of years on assignment abroad. Once back in Washington DC, he began to explore the lives of everyday Americans in three different cities he had connections to - Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia. The stories of these Americans form the basis for this book.

In the book Osnos follows a hedge fund manager, a small town newspaper editor, a community activist, and many others. Out of these stories a theme emerges of justice and fairness not only unfound, but systematically denied. In each story the impacts of American capitalism and politics are not uplifting, but rather cold, unfeeling and disheartening.

Another animating theme of these stories is that disconnection among Americans has become acute. We no longer identify with our local communities or are even aware of issues important to our neighborhood, town or city. As local newspapers have faded away and we've turned to the internet for information, many of us are more knowledgeable and animated by events happening nationally.

This book ties strands together from 9/11 through the housing crash of 2008 right up to today. The overall picture it paints is not pretty. Osnos seems to feel that America after Trump understands that many of the issues Trump highlighted in his first campaign were real and in need of addressing, even if Trump himself had no answers and failed to address them. Osnos points to signs of local activism and political involvement (particularly in the case of grassroots organizing in West Virginia) as hope that Americans will find a way to right our course.

There is not a grand conclusion to this book, and I think that's appropriate. While Osnos did a great job illuminating how we got to the current point, where we go from here is yet to be decided, and so better to let events play out.

For anyone interested in understanding the American political realities of today I recommend Wildland. I rate this book Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

NOTE: I received this book through Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange for a fair and honest review. ( )