Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices--from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin--to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people.

The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It's the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the hell happened to our country.

Author: Steve Almond
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 04/01/2018
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781597092265

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/11/2017
Booklist 02/15/2018 pg. 3
Shelf Awareness 05/01/2018