<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER &bull; When did America give up on fairness? The author of <i>Fantasyland</i> tells the epic history of&#160;how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever&#160;change&mdash;and charts a way back to the future.</b><br>&#160;<br><b>&ldquo;The one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country.&rdquo;&mdash;Walter Isaacson, author of&#160;<i>Steve Jobs</i>&#160;and<i>&#160;Leonardo da Vinci</i></b><br><br>During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.<br><br>Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen&#160;offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America&rsquo;s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame&mdash;to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal &ldquo;useful idiots,&rdquo; among whom he includes himself.<br><br>Only a writer with Andersen&rsquo;s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen&rsquo;s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

Unabridged.