A Safeway in Arizona

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In A SAFEWAY IN ARIZONA: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America (Viking / On Sale: December 20, 2011 /
ISBN: 9780670023202 / $26.95 / 256pp.), Tom Zoellner takes an in-depth look at the underlying fault lines in the state's culture and government that enabled for the Jared Lee Loughner shooting to take place.

The terrible events that took place on January 8, 2011 have exposed many of the problems in Arizona: the under-the-surface hysteria, the boom and bust of the housing market, the lack of established communities, the inept local government, unsustainable neighborhoods of strangers, and a shameful ignorance of the lives of Mexican people. The fault lines of America are on vivid display in this state, which has assumed a place in the union much like the Kansas Territory in the 1850s, an edgy frontier archipelago where the most fraught issues of the day are not really discussed but rather repressed, and then eventually screamed about.

The investigative reporting Zoellner is known for is evident in A SAFEWAY IN ARIZONA where he examines the larger context of this tragic mass murder, writing a portrait of Arizona at this moment in our national history, as a state that seems to stand as a symbol for most of our discontents and uncertainties.

A SAFEWAY IN ARIZONA is a rallying cry for a better way of life.

PRAISE FOR A SAFEWAY IN ARIZONA

"Tom Zoellner's remarkable book about a moment of tragedy in Arizona ends up a story of survival--a wounded Congresswoman's survival, and a wounded nation's survival as well."
-Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America

"Tom Zoellner brilliantly captures the slow death of Tucson and how one disturbed young man trapped in this emptiness shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and wounded and killed other people. This is a tale created by greed in the Southwest, and written in blood."
-Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River

"This is a remarkable book. It was deeply reported before Tom Zoellner could have known he would write it. It was deeply reported after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords made it absolutely necessary for him to write. Zoellner's long, intense relationships with his two main subjects-Giffords and the State of Arizona-give enormous authority to his storytelling. Unsentimental but driven by powerful emotion, the book makes crisp, riveting, expansive sense of a tragedy that was far more than a random massacre by a madman."
-William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing up in a Harder Country

"A compelling cry from the heart, this poignant book mixes an intimate personal story with painstaking journalism, and in doing so draws meaning from a terrifying attempt at political assassination. "A Safeway in Arizona" reveals the life-and-death consequences of alienation in an asphalt desert, and it makes a simple, forceful appeal: give a damn about your neighbor."
-Michael Downs, author of House of Good Hope