Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer

Hardcover

$22.99  $27.00 Save 15% Current price is $22.99, Original price is $27. You Save 15%.
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Wednesday, April 3
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides.

Democracy seems to be teetering on the edge, and renowned author George Packer shines a spotlight on the fractures that led to today's prevalent feeling of American despair. Last Best Hope is a sharply observed exploration of the narratives that have shaped America: the individualistic Free America, the elitist Smart America, the nationalistic Real America, and Just America, fraught with inter-group oppression.

With the turbulence of 2020 as the backdrop, from the devastating pandemic to economic crises and contentious elections, the book presents an insightful dissection of America's social ethos. Each narrative is explored under his discerning lens, making a case for how they have collectively failed to sustain the country's democracy.

To point a more hopeful way forward, Packer looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called the art of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374603663
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 06/15/2021
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

About The Author
George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

Strange Defeat 13

Four Americas 63

Equal America 141

Equalizers 165

Make America Again 187

Epilogue 217

Further Reading 221

Acknowledgments 225

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews