The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Reading The Sinking Years is like sitting in the front row at the midnight funeral of the American Dream

“This is a bleak profile of an era: frustrated efforts, betrayed trust, withering vitality, and fading hope. The powerful writing and lifelike characters present the vicissitudes of the United States over the past 30 years, and also write a thought-provoking prequel to the tragedy of the current social division.” - Liu Qing, professor at East China Normal University

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☆ A new history of the inner layer of American society that continues the timeline of "Glory and Dreams", an epic that defines our times

☆ A book that tells the story of the shattered American dream over the past thirty years: the lives of four people, the pain of four classes, and the elegy of a generation's failure

☆ Recommended by Xu Zhuoyun, Liu Qing, Zhou Lian, and Ou Yiwen, won the US National Book Award, and was selected as the best book of the year by more than 20 institutions:

New York Times's Best Books of the Year | NPR's Best Books of the Year | Financial Times' Best Books of the Year | Washington Post's Best Political Books of the Year | The New Republic's Best Books of the Year | Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year | Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of the Year | Apple iBooks' Best Books of the Year | Amazon's Best Books of the Year | Boston Globe's Best Books of the Year...

☆Written by a senior writer of The New Yorker, this is the pinnacle of non-fiction in the new century and was selected by Slate as one of the 50 best non-fiction books in the past 25 years

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It seemed as if the world collapsed overnight. All the old rules and moral codes were thrown aside. There were more lobbyists than politicians in Washington, no taboos in New York trading desks, house prices in Florida hit rock bottom, steel mills in the Rust Belt closed one after another, and farms in the South stopped growing tobacco. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

George Packer, winner of the National Book Award, follows four Americans born in the 1960s from different classes - a white Southern farmer pursuing the American dream, an African-American female worker who lost her factory job, an elite shuttling between Wall Street and Washington, and a Silicon Valley tycoon who made his fortune through the Internet economy - showing four ups and downs in life, uncovering the pain of four classes, and writing about the anger and sorrow of a generation.

This is the only generation of Americans whose lives are sinking: they were born in the golden age of post-war economic growth, and after struggling for half their lives, they are faced with the collapse of the traditional social structure.

In addition to the story of the protagonist, this book scans the social changes in the United States over the past thirty years like a movie lens, painting a panoramic and flowing scroll of culture, economy, and politics. The author writes biographies of politician Newt Gingrich, writer Raymond Carver, Walmart founder Sam Walton, rapper Jay-Z, etc., using ten idols of the times to reflect ten kinds of spirits of the times that are either resonating or sinking; it also records the thousands of speculators lost in the real estate market, the thousands of protesters who occupy Wall Street, and the thousands of silent people struggling on the line of survival, writing about the shattered American dream for thirty years.

Reading The Sinking Years is like sitting in the front row and watching the midnight funeral of the American Dream. It is a requiem for every American, and also a contemporary apocalypse about the turning point of the times and the dramatic changes in the world.

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