A few months ago our church book group read "The Unwinding" by George Packer. The full title is "The Unwinding - An Inner History of the New America". It chronicles societal changes that have taken place in the U.S. of A. over the past few decades, part of which includes the weakening of the middle class.
The initial self-description at the top of the book jacket's inner flap says "American Democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassin's Gate: America In Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives."
The author divides the book into three sections, each representing a time period over the past decades. He tells the story of America by tracing the lives of over a dozen individual Americans in various walks of life, including, among many, a factory worker, a ceo, an entrepreneur, and a couple politicians and entertainers.
We get to know each of the "characters", their families, and their communities as we read about how their lives change decade to decade. We learn about both successes and failures and that many of what might be considered failures were actually outside of our characters' own doing and control.
The book brings an unnerving feeling with its depiction of a gradual onslaught against people's financial well-being and our country's participatory democracy.
Our characters respond to this onslaught in various ways. A couple people succumb, many try to cope or reinvent themselves, but there are a couple stories interspersed in this that I think are truly heroic.
One such story showed the heroism of a woman trying to stand up to a bank foreclosing on a property while at the same time showed the evil behind some of the forces in America today. When the woman tried to fight the bank by going to the courthouse where the foreclosure proceedings were being held, she couldn't find and no one could tell her where the proceedings were taking place. Why? BECAUSE THEY NEVER EXPECTED ANY DEFENDANTS TO SHOW UP! When she, by trial and error, found the right courtroom, her entry into the room and her very presence flustered the officials, because no defendant EVER came to fight them and defend herself. She was shocked, as was I when reading this, that the bank's reps rapidly took care of and disposed of dozens of foreclosure cases in a day, taking people's homes minute by minute. And not all the plaintiffs were even in the courtroom to begin with! Some were there only electronically!
While you may think a story about economic life might be dull, you'll find the way the author has told the story through the lives of these multiple characters to be quite engaging. While I recommend this book, I will be the first to admit that it is a downer. However, the stories are timely and relevant; they explain a lot about what has been going on in our country. Through the tales of these very diverse and interesting characters and the wide fabric that the author weaves, you can get a greater understanding of the way our economic and political life is working ... and isn't working. These are the stories of living the dreams and the broken dreams.
=================================
"The Unwinding" (c) Published: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013
