The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer is an American journalist and novelist best known for his books and magazine articles about American foreign policy. Born in 1960, he grew up in Santa Clara, California, the son of two Stanford professors. He graduated from Yale in 1982 and served in the Peace Corps in Togo. As a writer, his stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, and World Affairs. He was a columnist for Mother Jones and a staff writer for The New Yorker from 2003 to 2018. In addition to The Unwinding, for which he won a National Book Award for Nonfiction, Packer also wrote a 2005 book about the Iraq War called The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. It was well received, as was his 2019 biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Packer currently writes for The Atlantic.

For The Unwinding, Packer conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with his subjects. He hoped to tell a story about what had happened to make Americans no longer trust each other or their nation, aiming to capture the unraveling of an American contract that essentially guaranteed a good life and role in a community for those who worked hard.