Search results for ""Author Evan Osnos""

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘A sweeping and brilliant portrait’ GUARDIAN ‘A reportorial tour de force … Heart-rending, appalling and hard to put down’ JANE MAYER ‘Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure … Definitive’ AYAD AKHTAR Evan Osnos moved to Washington, DC, in 2013 after a decade away from the United States. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments – the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault. In search of an explanation for the crisis, he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich; in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg; and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America’s psyche, two assaults on the country’s sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how it lost the moral confidence to see itself as larger than the sum of its parts.

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The new biography of President Joe Biden by National Book Award winner and New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos - A Financial Times, Guardian and Daily Express Book of the Year 'A thoroughly readable primer' Guardian 'Biden has overcome unimaginable tribulation, multiple presidential primary humiliations, a potentially crippling speech impediment and his own mediocrity. Now he carries the hopes of billions upon his shoulders' Sunday Times President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest – fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors and reversals of fortune. His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship – an essential quality as he addresses a nation at its most dire hour in decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos illuminates Biden’s life and captures the characters and meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. He draws on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy – a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.

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*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014*A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China.A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau. The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the ‘Wastepaper Queen’. Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China’s story – one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Rolls Royces and Ferraris yet the word ‘luxury’ is banned from billboards. It has more Christians than members of the Communist Party. And why does a government that has lifted more people from poverty than any other so strictly restrain freedom of expression? Based on years of research, Age of Ambition is a stunning narrative that reveals China as we have never understood it before.

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In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he’s a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds. China Daily reports that he has acquired a popularity “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.” China Newsweek declared him the “most influential foreign figure” of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by the nation’s swift embrace of a market economy—a guide whose communitarian ideas resonate with aspects of China’s own rich and ancient philosophical traditions.Chinese citizens often describe a sense that, in sprinting ahead, they have bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. The market economy has lifted millions from poverty but done little to define ultimate goals for individuals or the nation. Is the market all there is? In this context, Sandel’s charismatic, interactive lecturing style, which roots moral philosophy in real-world scenarios, has found an audience struggling with questions of their responsibility to one another.Encountering China brings together leading experts in Confucian and Daoist thought to explore the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West. The result is a profound examination of diverse ideas about the self, justice, community, gender, and public good. With a foreword by Evan Osnos that considers Sandel’s fame and the state of moral dialogue in China, the book will itself be a major contribution to the debates that Sandel sparks in East and West alike.

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