01/10/2022
Journalist Rice (The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget) offers a fast-paced and jam-packed political and cultural history of America in the year 2000. Pointing out that Florida was where some of the 9/11 hijackers learned to fly, where Donald Trump first planned to run for president, and where the controversy over Elián Gonzalez’s immigration case played out, Rice characterizes the state as the “crucible” from which 21st-century America emerged. He vividly describes the family dynamics and hard-nosed tactics behind George W. Bush’s political ascendancy, the impact Al Gore’s candidacy had on his relationship with Bill Clinton, and the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision to end the Florida recount and award the presidency to Bush. Along the way, Rice offers new details about such well-known events as the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and weaves in the unlikely story of a Black Wall Street executive involved in a money-laundering and arms-trafficking scheme with links to Osama bin Laden. Impressively sourced and energetically written, this is a rollicking account of how the country got to where it is today. (Feb.)
"In his beautifully crafted and rigorously reported volume, Andrew Rice takes readers back to Florida in 2000, laying out a cultural and political history of a moment at which America's political system was turned inside out, its power structures upended. The Year That Broke America is vivid and wide-ranging; it also happens to be a page turner." — Rebecca Traister, bestselling author of Good and Mad.
“In this masterful work of storytelling that’s as entertaining as it is illuminating, Andrew Rice, an astute and relentless reporter, has retraced the intersections of politics, finance, pop culture and media at the turn of the century to create a rich, pulsing narrative filled with portents, signs, ironies, comedies of error and revelatory new discoveries. By dropping us back into the frothy, decadent whirl of the year 2000 Rice is describing a world we thought we knew—but didn’t. And it’s a world we’ve been living in ever since." — Joe Hagan, Author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
“Andrew Rice's panoramic history of America in the year 2000 is engrossing, insightful, tragic and above all, irresistible. From the 9/11 plotters and coke-fueled titans of Wall Street, to the battle for the White House and the first buffoonish political pretensions of a certain New York City real estate developer, Rice's keen eye has captured America in full at a moment of critical transition. With a novelist's pacing and an utterly gripping cast of characters, he persuasively traces many of our current discontents to the enthusiasms, antagonisms, and sheer oddities of America at the dawn of the new Millennium.” — Ronald Brownstein
“Journalist Rice offers a fast-paced and jam-packed political and cultural history of America in the year 2000. . . . Pointing out that Florida was where some of the 9/11 hijackers learned to fly, where Donald Trump first planned to run for president, and where the controversy over Elián Gonzalez’s immigration case played out, Rice characterizes the state as the “crucible” from which 21st-century America emerged. . . . Impressively sourced and energetically written, this is a rollicking account of how the country got to where it is today.” — Publishers Weekly
“A heady portrait.” — Kirkus Reviews
“What comes into focus through Rice’s eclectic collection of Florida Man tales is a prehistory of the Darkest Timeline—the one we’re living today. Out of that cauldron emerged a witch’s brew of American carnage we maybe should have seen coming.” — Los Angeles Times
In this masterful work of storytelling that’s as entertaining as it is illuminating, Andrew Rice, an astute and relentless reporter, has retraced the intersections of politics, finance, pop culture and media at the turn of the century to create a rich, pulsing narrative filled with portents, signs, ironies, comedies of error and revelatory new discoveries. By dropping us back into the frothy, decadent whirl of the year 2000 Rice is describing a world we thought we knew—but didn’t. And it’s a world we’ve been living in ever since."
What comes into focus through Rice’s eclectic collection of Florida Man tales is a prehistory of the Darkest Timeline—the one we’re living today. Out of that cauldron emerged a witch’s brew of American carnage we maybe should have seen coming.
Andrew Rice's panoramic history of America in the year 2000 is engrossing, insightful, tragic and above all, irresistible. From the 9/11 plotters and coke-fueled titans of Wall Street, to the battle for the White House and the first buffoonish political pretensions of a certain New York City real estate developer, Rice's keen eye has captured America in full at a moment of critical transition. With a novelist's pacing and an utterly gripping cast of characters, he persuasively traces many of our current discontents to the enthusiasms, antagonisms, and sheer oddities of America at the dawn of the new Millennium.
"In his beautifully crafted and rigorously reported volume, Andrew Rice takes readers back to Florida in 2000, laying out a cultural and political history of a moment at which America's political system was turned inside out, its power structures upended. The Year That Broke America is vivid and wide-ranging; it also happens to be a page turner."
2021-11-30
Chronicling a chaotic year in American life (not 2020).
Journalist Rice, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, draws on a mixture of reportage, archival sources, interviews, and legal testimony to create a heady portrait of the year 2000, which he claims marked a shattering turning point for the nation. Wildly digressive and overlong, the narrative veers from politics to business, immigration to terrorism, Florida to Kandahar. He begins in late 1999, when Ziad Jarrah left Germany to engage in terrorist training. His life would end on Sept. 11, 2001, in an attack orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. It was a year when the nation’s cultural elite were presided over by a cast of men whose fortunes would fall precipitously in the decades that followed: film mogul Harvey Weinstein, TV executives Les Moonves and Roger Ailes, Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly, and Matt Lauer. On the political scene, Al Gore struggled to separate himself from the huge personality of Bill Clinton, while George W. Bush honed his identity as an “easygoing centrist” and “compassionate conservative.” The election in which the Supreme Court decided for Bush was the first since 1888 in which a candidate who won the popular vote still lost. On the immigrant front, the family battle over custody of Elián Gonzalez played out on TV, a spectacle that cultural critic Frank Rich called a “relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism.” Reality TV, not limited to real-life events, was shaped into a new genre of entertainment with CBS’s hugely popular Survivor. Among the dramatis personae in Rice’s well-populated history are Janet Reno, Clinton’s attorney general; David Boies, Gore’s lawyer; financier Kevin Ingram, involved in the “gangland culture” of Deutsche Bank; real estate tycoon Donald Trump, ruminating on the idea of running for office, and his then-girlfriend Melania Knauss; and activist Jesse Jackson.
Though Rice doesn’t mount a fully convincing argument for the year’s significance, he tells a lively story.
