The Unwinding

Readers return most often to that “Packer never offers an overarching narrative,” a critic finding “no actual sociology, economics or political analysis in it” and “almost no big-picture analysis.” Several read a class condescension toward working-class and populist-right subjects, a “subtle NPR signaling of us and them.” A cluster finish with no sense of payoff, one saying outright “I don't really see any point in the book.” The celebrity interstitials on Gingrich and Oprah and Thiel are called thin filler. A UK critic notes there is “barely a Latino voice in the book,” and one major-daily critic ranks it “perhaps New Yorker writer George Packer's worst nonfiction book.”