Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
George Packer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
George Packer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Packer’s slim book, Last Best Hope, begins with patriotic despair.
... incisive, deftly argued.
Packer brings Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal home at a touch over 200 pages, and for many of those pages it’s unclear whether he’ll have enough material to make it to the end. The physical thinness of these books betrays the frailty of liberal thinking in its moment of crisis: Assailed from both the left and the right, hostage to finance, and no longer able to secure the equality that grounds its central promise of individual freedom, how can liberalism reinvent itself?.
While this is not a new subject for Packer, the tone and tenor of his latest book is decidedly insular. At times he does not seem wholly convinced by his own increasingly abstract pronouncements. Never fully answering the question of how we arrived at our current predicament, Packer does not explain how a revitalized liberalism can get us out of it. The search for causes and policy remedies remains secondary to the reassertion of ideological precepts: above all else, that liberalism and America in general remain our era’s last best hope. To his credit, Packer identifies a core problem: Inequality in the United States.
National Book Award–winner Packer explains our current political tensions as the collision of four incompatible narratives about what makes the U.S. special.
Like most books written by patriots in moments of national crisis, George Packer’s Last Best Hope tries to answer two questions: How did our country get into this mess, and how can we get out of it?.
In a great book—and I have no hesitation calling The Unwinding and Our Man great books—such romantic authorial blind spots are forgivable. But Packer’s latest, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is all blind spot. At barely more than two hundred pages, it manages to feel more indulgent than his previous books, respectively two and three times as long. Packer is a gifted reporter and storyteller but a mediocre polemicist, and with Last Best Hope, he has embraced polemics at the expense of reporting and storytelling.
... sharp and concise.
Packer presents sharp, insightful critiques of all sides [...] but occasionally slips into melodrama.