In celebration of Kurt Andersen’s paperback release of his NYT best selling book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America (2020), he and I will be having a live conversation at House of Books in Kent, CT.
When did America give up on fairness? Kurt tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future.
Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.
KURT ANDERSEN is a writer. His latest book is about how U.S. society was re-engineered during the late 20th century to serve big business and the well-to-do at the expense of everyone else. It was a New York Times bestseller, like its companion volume Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (2017), Andersen's prize-winning history of America's weakness for exciting untruths. In addition, he’s the author of four critically acclaimed, bestselling novels –– You Can't Spell America Without Me (2017), True Believers (2012), Heyday (2007) and Turn of the Century (1999). Andersen co-created and hosted the Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio program Studio 360, and most recently co-created and narrated Nixon At War, a podcast documentary series released in the summer of 2021. He also writes for television, appears regularly on MSNBC and contributes to the New York Times. He co-founded Spy magazine, and was a columnist and critic for The New Yorker, New York and Time, as well as editor-in-chief of New York. He lives with his wife Anne Kreamer in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, and Brooklyn.