Author Evan Osnos has earned a reputation as a keen observer of American politics, economics and culture for over two decades, along with reporting from China and the Middle East. Wildland: The Making of America's Fury is a study of the period of American history bookended by the twin terrorist attacks of September 11th and January 6th and the alarming downward spiral that's taken place. He interviews and observes three locations, Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois, gaining perspectives from three very different socio-economic groups. It's thought-provoking and worth the read.

I received this Advance Reader Copy of Wildland: The Making of America's Fury from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Evan Osnos,you either like this book or not!! We are now living this book whether you want to or not and for me it makes you face truths and kids and how we so fast can lose our independence and Democracy,especially with this last election and how you have to really face that there are some really really ugly,mean and cruel people in this world and that so many are out for themselves and the Patriotism that me being 66 was brought up on,well it looks like it's almost gone!! That's scary!! I read like 70 % and had to stop because it's not cause it's not any good it's because I sat and cried that what I was brought up to believe it's going to be gone!! I believe in right and wrong,lies and truths helping people ,my dad was in the Army for 24 years, I was taught to believe so much in this country and after Jan.6,2022 I so feel like it was almost taken away from me forever!!

As a first time reader of a political book I enjoyed it. Evan Osnos, is a well known investigative reporter helped me understand some historical events that have happened in my lifetime. From 9/11 to the attack on our nations capitol. I would recommend this book to non political readers like myself looking to understand these events.

Wildland was equal parts fascinating and triggering. As a political junkie and history buff, I appreciated the color Osnos provided to various characters throughout the book. However, having just lived through much of what is written about, it felt a little too close to home.

My reading experience is best likened to watching a car crash and not being able to look away. I flew through the book and definitely enjoyed parts of it but perhaps I would have enjoyed it more with additional distance.

I read maybe 15% of this one! I thought I would find an interesting view of America but I quickly loss focus/the need to keep reading.

I didn’t finish this book. But thank you for the opportunity to read it!

Wildland describes the many ways Americans lost faith in their government and society, becoming a tinderbox waiting for the arsonist Donald Trump. It begans with the attack on 9/11/2001 and continues to the insurrection on 1/6/2021, looking at the many changes that happened during those twenty years that made us all so mad at the world.

Osnos can claim both the and outsider perspective. He writes about places he lived and worked, but he spent twelve years working in China so many of the changes that may be imperceptible as they happened were jarring to come home to. He set out to find out how and why we changed so much and why so many of us have given up on the common good.

Drawing on his lived experience in Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois as well as interviews with people from there, he is able to go deeply into the emotional landscape while mapping the socioeconomic environmental changes. During this time, inequality increased. A few became incomprehensibly wealthy while nearly everyone else lost ground. The expectation that the next generation will do better than the last has been lost, not for one, but for two generations. People have a right to be angry.



While Wildland is fascinating, well-researched, and well-written, I think Evan Olnos misses the main driver of anger today. He mentions racism and even notes that the birthrate of nonwhite babies outpaces white babies by a bit. But perhaps because racism was there in 2001 and is still here in 2021, he underestimates its effect. Economic conditions do not explain why people without health insurance oppose reforms that would insure them and safeguard their health, but white supremacy is so powerful that people would rather be poor than equal.

It’s not that Olnos ignores racism but he consistently underestimates its power. The word racism appears only seventeen times in a 430-page book and eighteen for racist. And yes, all the other trends contibute to our problems, the loss of local news, the weakening of labor, the gloridication og greed to the point Gordan Gecko becomes the hero. But all of that would not be enough without racism. For Olnos, racism is primarily expressed through anti-immigrant sentiment easily exploited by Trump, but that is less enduring and less virulent than the anti-Black racism expressed through opposition to democracy itself. The claim that Biden lost is rooted in the deeply held belief that Black voters are not as legitimate as white voters. It is why we shrug at 12-hour lines to vote and why the GOP can sustain absolute oppositing to voting rights. White people believe in democracy so long as they make the decisions, the very thought of losing their absolute hegemony sends them into an insurrectionist rage.

Every point Olnos makes is valid, but he miss the point. Racism is the lever through which class oppression is able to move mountains. White people would rather be poor than equal. Class analysis will only take us so far, if we do not grapple with white supremacy first and foremost, there is no permanent progress. For that reason, although again and again, I was moved by and agreed with Olnos chapter by chapter, I was also infuriated by the absence of reckoning honestly with the power of white supremacy.

I received an e-galley of Wildland from the publisher through NetGalley

Wildland at Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Macmillan
Evan Osnos author site
Essay at Harvard Gazette

Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Osnos takes a good look at "what happened" to get us to the state we're in, through the lens of examining 3 very different cultures and experiences - he chose 3 areas with which he has personal/family experience, and reported on the political and cultural conditions that led to the fury and violence of America's current state. He looked at Greenwich, CT, to view some of the very richest people in the country, he looked at Clarksburg, WV, to view a rural area where the bottom dropped out, and he looked at Chicago, an area of urban poverty.

One of the most interesting points that comes through is the role that the demise of local media plays in this. It appears that everything has become nationalized, so while a specific issue may not actually be involved in your area, you can get all spun up and angry about something happening somewhere else. A lot of misplaced anger, and it makes it much more difficult to explain rational causes for the conditions that one is currently experiencing.

I know it's not reasonable to expect answers - when I read books like this, I keep hoping for a nice, conclusory final chapter that says "and here's how we fix this mess." Sadly, this is not a rational expectation, and it doesn't happen here. However, it is a good explanation of how we got here, and perhaps will lead to some ideas about how to fix it.

A compelling book with superb reporting that falls just shy of being a great book. A clearer structure for the narrative and a more thought-through thesis would have made this even better.

Regular readers of Osnos' work in The New Yorker will appreciate how prescient, in retrospect, his reporting and writing proved to be. If nothing else, this book serves as a primer for understanding what the next few years could look like on the US social/political landscape.

One of the best books I have read in 2021. As we try to make sense of our current state of democracy, Osnos perfectly lends his journalistic chops to tell interlocking stories of individuals in Chicago, Clarksburg, West Virginia and Greenwich, Connecticut. He has personal stories of his own from these three very different cities (socio-economically and racially) and centers these stories around the key issues facing America today. He is able to shine a light on the mindsets of voters in these cities. He not only highlights the differences but also points out the similarities - people feeling trapped by circumstances and not feeling well-served by institutions. Many of the same issues about our current political situation have been written about ad nauseum. However, Osnos brings a thorough and well-researched analysis with a personal touch through the voices of people to a difficult topic.

I highly recommend this book.

It took me quite a while to read this book, because it was so dense and often disturbing that I could only bear to absorb it in small chunks. Osnos focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois and followed a few individuals as they made their way through the changing economics and politics of their locales. Many political, cultural and economic themes are developed over years and sometimes reaching back decades to remind us of the historic underpinnings for certain movements. Osnos is well versed on many aspects of current and past events, and covers a lot of ground here. But there's not much new analysis or thinking. It feels like a rehash of news I've read over the last few years after retirement when I had time to be more politically aware. Nevertheless, this could be an excellent book to re-read in 10 years when I've perhaps forgotten some of what we're going through now.

I made it 25% of the way through Wildland by Evan Osnos. The research for the section of the book I read was well done, but I had trouble getting into the book. The chapters felt very disconnected and I couldn't understand how the central theme of the demise of america was connected to the narrative stories he chose to tell. I might pick this one up again in 2022 to give it another shot, but for right now, it's a Did Not Finish (DNF) from me.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book!

A thoughtful, brilliantly written portrait of today’s America. I loved Evan Osnos' writing about China but on his home turf he is not worse, and I think that this decade abroad gave him a very unique perspective and insight. It is somewhat scary when he is drawing comparisons between the US and China… Besides a lot of interesting knowledge, you will find here also his personal reflections and some on-the-ground reporting. Highly recommended.

Thanks to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.

Evan Osnos is one of the country's most thoughtful commentators, and here he turns his lens on the divides within the United States. He's a terrific writer, and it's a powerful book. I recommend it.

The concept of this book is fantastic and made me eager to read this author’s personal experience and perspective on how our society has shifted, considered from the viewpoint of three different communities that have shaped his life. The writing is excellent and this book gives readers much to think about…and a way to think about it, which is a factor so often missing in the current onslaught of information.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this excellent work!

This writer from my favorite magazine The New Yorker did a fascinating analysis of "how we go here..." I love the premise here - studying 3 towns (Greenwich, Clarksburg, Chicago) to understand where we are. The idea worked very well - the work is long but very good. Highly recommend! The writing is excellent as you'd expect!

Evan Osnos. Write that name down, really.
This book , Wildland, is about how we got to where we are as a people, a country and as political beings.
Mr Osnos meticulously researched for this book and it shows. It reads as a giant thesis paper but much friendlier. Want to know why newspapers are a dying thing? It is in here.
Want to know a bit about how/ why the stock market is what it has become. In here.
Want to know how your politicians have changed or described a particular view ( you would be surprised that is often not voters shaping his or her thoughts)..
I cannot begin to share adequately how this book covers our history over maybe the last 30-40 years,
Trust me, if you want to know how we have changed as a country without it being a dry “ In 19 blah blah, so and so happened read” get this book,

Between September 11, 2001 and January 6, 2021 “is a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the union as larger than the sum of its parts. A century and a half after the Civil War, America was again a cloven nation. It’s stability was foundering on fundamental tensions over the balance between individual freedom and the protection of others, over the reckoning with injustice, and over a basic test of any political society: Whose life matters?”

A lot of this book focuses on three locations and the author conducted extensive interviews there - Clarksburg, West Virginia, Chicago, Illinois and Greenwich, Connecticut. The rest of the book traces political, social and economic developments that have contributed to the current divisive situation.

I want something to help me understand why people can’t see beyond themselves to further goals that advance the common good. John Kenneth Galbraith referred to modern conservatism as “the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.” This book does a pretty good job of demonstrating that everyone in the country seems to be a combination of angry, frightened and disaffected. It’s a depressing picture and unfortunately the author doesn’t offer any guidance for a way out.

During the 2016 election Trump hired an operative to cull right wing media to determine the themes that would lure the missing white voters back to the Republicans: “xenophobia, conspiracy, racism, anti-government fervor and religious fundamentalism”. At that time, Linsey Graham (now the world class ass kisser) accurately called him a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot”. Trump rode that meanspirited horse to victory. He got a frightening number of votes, and he got even more in the 2020 election. The book is interesting, but it’s a really sad story.

I listened to the audiobook and the author did a good job narrating his book. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

“Living in Washington in the years of Donald Trump, I often returned, in my mind, to that image of a landscape primed to burn. Sometimes it felt like a metaphor, and sometimes it felt like fact. But, eventually, I came to understand it as something else— a parable for a time in American history, when the land and the people seems to be mirroring the rage of the other. I wanted to understand how that time had come to be, and what it would leave behind.”

Author Evan Osnos and I found ourselves in the same city asking the same questions over the past several years— what sparked America’s fury, and like a raging wildfire, how do you contain it once it’s spread? The book examines political and social culture and life experiences in rural WV, a Black community in Chicago, and wealthy Greenwhich, CT, and I felt well illustrated one of the saddest things about the modern American tragedy we are all living through— our struggles stem from vastly different foundations, but in the end, the fears that drive this rage are remarkably similar. A sense of real or perceived injustice, a desire for a better future for ourselves and our loved ones & a realization that the institutions formed to protect our interests have evolved to instead serve their own.

Much like the state of society, I don’t know if the book left me more encouraged or discouraged. But I appreciated the author’s writing style and ability to connect the narratives.

My thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroix for the digital ARC.

This was a great look into the political turmoil that led to the dividing of this country. Even if you feel you know the hows and whys, this book digs into the reasons and is a good overview of the politics that led to this political climate.