George Packer’s new “The Unwinding” is “something close to a nonfiction masterpiece,” says Dwight Garner in the New York Times:
If you were born after 1960, Mr. Packer suggests, you have spent much of your life watching structures long in place collapsing — things like farms, factories, subdivisions and public schools on the one hand, and “ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks” and “manners and morals everywhere” on the other.
What has replaced them, he says, is organized money, as well as a society in which “winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”