Unwinding

The author tells the story of the past 3 decades by journeying through the lives of several American: a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money and a Silicon Valley billionaire who arrives at a radical vision of the future. George Packer interweaves these stories with sketches of public figures.