The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer

The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain--in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism (The New York Times).

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR - No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Trump summoned the most treacherous forces in American history and conducted them with the ease of a grand maestro.

Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn't know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump's victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.

In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump's rise--including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.

While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer's writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn't happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible and continues to endure. Unless we confront these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to the forces that have nearly destroyed it time and again.

Adam Serwer has written for The Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics while often viewing it through the lens of history. Serwer was a Spring Fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as well as the Ira Lipman Fellow at the Columbia University School of Journalism. He is the recipient of the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593230800
ISBN 10	0593230809
Title	The Cruelty Is the Point
Author	Adam Serwer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2021-06-29
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.