Description
Book SynopsisOne of America's finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart
Trade Review"A riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America." -- Joseph O'Neill - The New York Times Book Review
"[Sharlet’s] stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it’s a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.... [The Undertow] has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade." -- Ann Neumann - The Guardian
"[
The Undertow] is journalism-as-art, attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present. Hopefully there will still be readers then." -- Adam Fleming Petty - The Washington Post
"[
The Undertow] is a foreboding drive through the backroads of the country’s rising militancy. From campy Trump rallies and a memorial service for the January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt to a televangelist’s church in Miami and a self-declared prophet in Omaha, Sharlet takes a hard, unwavering look at the nation’s guns-and-Bibles underbelly" -- James Sullivan - The Boston Globe
"Sharlet's startling, Didion-esque
The Undertow, with its CinemaScope landscapes and slightest of hopes, visits the dirt lanes and country rallies where Christian nationalism threatens. " -- Chicago Tribune
