Interesting Times Writings from a Turbulent Decade [Paperback]

The 2013 National Book Award Winner
ANew York TimesBestseller

Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history.Interesting Timesunites brilliant investigative pieces such as Betrayed, about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11, 2001 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror, Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few key themes recur: the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal.

Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalachia to Obama, these essays hold a mirror up to our own troubled times and showcase Packer's unmistakable perspective, which is at once both wide-angled and humane.

George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell. Like the author ofHomage to Catalonia, the places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality.Jed Lipinski,The Village Voice

This volume coheres better than most in the genre. That's because Packer has a far more coherent worldview than most reporters...Interesting Timesseems an inapt title, ironic and detached in ways that Packer is simply not. But his is the good kind of attachment, self-aware and self-reflective.Franklin Foer,The New York Times Book Review

In reading [Packer] we see the staggering lS.