Publishers Weekly
07/19/2021
Inequalities of wealth, class, and culture are tearing the country apart, according to this incisive panorama of America’s discontents. New Yorker writer Osnos (Joe Biden) conducts a loose survey of socio-politics from 9/11 to the January 6 Capitol riot, grounded in journalistic portraits of three places where he’s lived: Greenwich, Conn., where corrupt Wall Street plutocrats live on the profits from hollowing out the heartland’s economy; Clarksburg, W.Va., in an Appalachia floundering in opioid abuse and Trumpian white identity politics; and Chicago, where the South and West sides are awash in poverty and gang violence, a world away from that city’s glittering downtown. These locales represent, Osnos contends, a country fragmented by mutual incomprehension, conspiracy theories, and a “combat mindset,” where people have “lost their vision for the common good.” Osnos vividly sketches hedge-fund managers, ex-cons, Barack Obama, and white nationalist Richard Spencer, among others, and encapsulates worldviews in elegant, pithy prose. (“You could hone every edge of your family’s life—from your life expectancy to your tax avoidance to your child’s performance on the SATs,” he writes of the Greenwich gentry.) The result is an engrossing and revealing look at how deeply connected yet far apart Americans are. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"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
"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?
Library Journal
09/01/2021
New Yorker writer Osnos (Age of Ambition) uses the metaphor of "wildland" (a firefighting term for tinder-ready territory) to describe the buildup of economic, political, and social resentments that ignited three disparate communities where he has lived—Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago—between 9/11/01 and the Capitol Insurrection of 1/6/21. In a personal, somewhat autobiographical account intended for concerned Americans, Osnos considers the dissimilitude among residents, which he memorably presents in vignettes illustrating differences in credulousness (of the media and politicians); feelings of safety; and expectations of intergenerational mobility and the American Dream. The author dissects the widening socioeconomic chasms between Greenwich (with its several hedge funds and financial services firms), the economically declining Clarksburg (which is navigating the opioid epidemic), and Chicago (whose neighborhoods are alternately experiencing blight or gentrification). Osnos relies on extensive research in social sciences and history, archival records, local newspaper articles, and numerous interviews. VERDICT This cogently written book is a useful review of intertwined events in the early 21st-century United States.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
JANUARY 2022 - AudioFile
Evan Osnos compassionately shares his extensive research on the crumbling of American democracy, civility, and equality. Listeners join him as he visits three diverse places he has lived: wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut; segregated Chicago; and coal-mining Clarksburg, West Virginia. He deftly interviews men and women of all ages and stations—including laborers, politicians, supervisors, clergy, and more—seeking insight into how and why things have deteriorated so badly. He movingly profiles the poor, who have suffered most because of disenfranchisement and unequal opportunities, along with a cynical investor, who changes when he realizes how the affluent are hurting the needy. Osnos is cautiously optimistic about America’s future as he focuses on the strength and determination of African Americans to continue fighting for equality that is rightfully theirs. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-06-25
The National Book Award–winning journalist examines the ideological gaps that have widened between 9/11 and the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
After years of reporting from China, the longtime New Yorker staffer returned to find that America had lost its gift for “the rational approach, reason, the meeting of minds in honorable agreement after open argument” that John Gunther described in his 1947 bestseller, Inside U.S.A. “If American 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 it had lost its center of gravity,” writes Osnos. He explores how it happened through stellar reporting that blends a high-altitude view of national changes with close-ups of private citizens in three places he’s lived in the U.S. Osnos is at his best in his superb portrait of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up in the “Golden Triangle” that “represented the highest concentration of wealth in America” and where values shifted along with an influx of hedge fund money. Greenwich grandees once included people like Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of future presidents, “who believed, fundamentally, in the duty of government to help people who did not enjoy his considerable advantages.” Conversely, the current generation tends to see its wealth as self-justifying and to prefer “targeted private philanthropy” to activities like serving on “local charity boards.” Osnos is slightly less insightful about Chicago, where Black residents have felt stung by the gap between their Obama-era hopes and the persistence of bigotry, and West Virginia, where predatory tactics by so-called vulture investors and others have robbed mineworkers of precious benefits. Other recent books have dealt more astutely with some of his subjects—Chris McGreal’s American Overdose with West Virginia’s opioid epidemic and John Woodrow Cox’s Children Under Fire with gun violence—but 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.
