The American Beast

'America's greatest living essayist . . . Wonderful' Fintan O'Toole

A panoptical vision of modern America, from the brilliant mind of Jill Lepore.

The past decade has marked a shift in America's trajectory. Jill Lepore, the acclaimed writer and New Yorker columnist, has been tracing its contested storylines in real time, beginning with the run-up to Donald Trump's election, through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. Here we encounter Americans' rising techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented - but armed - aimlessness.

With the wit and verve that has made her the acclaimed national historian of a generation, these essays reflect on the consuming public fissures of this era: culture wars and the corrosion of the media; disruptive innovation and the future of technology; constitutional crises surrounding gun rights and the racial history behind the very language of insurrection. Balancing a penetrating personal lens with indispensable history, she makes sense of life in a moment of aberration and extremity that has left our political landscape forever changed.

The American Beast offers an arresting portrait of America, capturing the tumultuous relationship between the country's violent past and fractured present.

If you want to know how America got here, Lepore's essays are essential reading, with quick insights and bomblets of surprise -- TLS
Lepore is a brilliant historian . . . She sees history as a narrative and digs deep to investigate the root cause of problems -- Irish Times
PRAISE FOR JILL LEPORE: The pre-eminent historian of forgotten tales from America's past -- David Runciman
Lepore is America's greatest living essayist. No one else can sway so gracefully between the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, while remaining so firmly grounded in common human experience . . . Wonderful -- Fintan O'Toole
A person can't help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing -- George Saunders
Lepore writes history like a poet -- Dan Snow
Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style -- Amanda Foreman
A compelling political narrative -- David Kynaston

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, where she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, and American political history. She is the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (winner of the Bancroft Prize), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Secret History of Wonder Woman (winner of the American History Book Prize), If Then (longlisted for the National Book Award) and many other titles. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker, host of the podcast The Last Archive, and was the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2021.

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