Bag O' Books: 'Wildland: The Making of America's Fury' by Evan Osnos

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The past decade or so has brought readers a fresh round of what's probably an old genre -- the literature of American decline. Books like George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Alec MacGillis' "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America" have documented the forces tearing our society apart -- a financial system that delivers disproportionate wealth to a select few who hide themselves in walled-off supermansions; governments that neuter themselves and their ability to serve their citizens' well-being in order to make the rich richer; the left-behind places in rural America and in the Black parts of our big cities; the hollowed-out newspapers whose meager pages leave the electorate ill-informed and vulnerable to the conspiracy swamps of social media. "Wildland" is another one of these books, and it's a very good book, but it is also -- on top of those earlier examples -- exhausting. Our country is falling apart, and that's tremendously shitty, but it makes for some great literature.