Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution
    Ebook846 pages11 hours

    Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

    By Ben Fountain

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    In a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Fountain recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis

    Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself.

    Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, to our weaponized new conception of American exceptionalism, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump.

    In an urgent and deeply incisive voice, Ben Fountain has fused history and the present day to paint a startling portrait of the state of our nation.  Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9780062688767
    Author

    Ben Fountain

    Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.

    Read more from Ben Fountain

    Related to Beautiful Country Burn Again

    Related ebooks

    Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Ghosts of George Saunders

      Apr 1, 2017

      The acclaimed author goes deep on Civil War days and the humanity of Donald Trump supporters.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Taking Back Trump’s America review: Peter Navarro’s venomous Maga saga

      Sep 20, 2022

      Peter Navarro’s new book won’t win him many new friends. For just one example of the former Trump trade adviser’s frequently, uh, pungent turns of phrase, he compares Jared Kushner to human excrement. Nor does his disdain for the aspirant dauphin end

      3 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: GDP, The Yardstick Of Economic Success, Is Choking Us And The Planet

      Feb 28, 2018

      Some years ago, the Onion ran a satirical piece about a Chinese worker churning out plastic tat for American consumers. Chen Hsien is unimpressed with the useless items Americans seem to crave, from salad shooters and microwave omelet cookers to anim

      4 min read

    • Article

      Carl Hiaasen: Be Racist Or Be Dumb. But Don’t Be Both — And Definitely Not In Public

      Jun 29, 2020

      There is a viral video taken in Missouri that probably ought to be required viewing for white people like me, who once thought that the public, defiant, in-your-face racism we saw during our youth had relocated in the shadows. If George Corley Wallac

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fox News Commentator Charles Krauthammer Says He Has Weeks To Live

      Jun 8, 2018

      Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer issued a public statement Friday announcing that he is terminally ill and has a few weeks to live. Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist who also has long been considered one of the most rational and inform

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • Article

      One Page

      Aug 18, 2021

      “Like many of the ghost stories I’ve grown up with, this one needs to start with a death.” Seeing Ghosts (Grand Central Publishing, August 2021) by Kat Chow. First book, memoir. Agent: Jin Auh. Editor: Maddie Caldwell. Publicists: Matthew Ballast and

      2 min read

    • Article

      Julio Rodriguez

      Mar 8, 2022

      Julio Rodriguez
      3 min read

    • Article

      You Will Miss the Pizza Delivery Driver

      Jan 16, 2024

      Except for the lone pair of baggy Guess jeans and oversize silk shirt I wore most days in middle school, I’ve never been very fashionable. So on my first day as a Domino’s delivery driver in college, when the store manager tossed me a used red-and-bl

      6 min read

    • Article

      Zero

      May 10, 2019

      Zero
      3 min read

    Reviews for Beautiful Country Burn Again

    4/5

    13 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      POLITICS/GOVERNMENTBen FountainBeautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and RevolutionEcco BooksHardcover, 978-0-0626-8884-2 (also available as an e-book, audiobook, and large-print paperback), 448 pgs., $27.99September 25, 2018“Nautonomy: the asymmetrical production and distribution of life chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political participation.” —David Held, Democracy and the Global OrderBen Fountain pulls no punches. “This wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation,” he writes, “a creature comprised of degenerate political logic.”Where were you when you heard the news? You remember, don’t you, whether you thought the news was fantastic or catastrophic? I do; I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on a 787 bound for New Delhi. So, naturally, at 9 p.m. EST I began pestering the cabin crew for election news. The pilot resorted to announcing updates and when it was done, when the result was announced, I cried.I write this review on the day Paul Manafort pleads guilty to conspiracy against the United States.Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution is the first book of nonfiction from Ben Fountain, a former attorney, whose fiction is famous. You may not be familiar with Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a collection of short stories which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2007, but you cannot have avoided Fountain’s novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and became a film directed by Ang Lee — Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.“I was having feelings. They weren’t good feelings,” Fountain writes. “By Thanksgiving, 2015, these feelings had crystalized into a sense that something new and ugly was afoot in the land of the famously free.” So, The Guardian newspaper dispatched him to the campaign trail to “figure out what the hell was going on out there.” The result was a series of essays for the newspaper which eventually became Beautiful Country Burn Again.Much more than a simple expansion of that series of essays, this book is a triumph of reporting — a synthesis of research, interviews, observation, experience, and analysis producing a vital mix of politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. Fountain contextualizes the result with a “Book of Days,” preceding each chapter, which sets the global stage upon which the events of that chapter played themselves out.Fountain explores and explains and distills into what he calls the “American anthropology,” which is basically this: If we believe freedom is a finite thing, then the perception of a loss of freedom necessarily means that someone else has gained more freedom by taking it from us, and the less freedom you have, the more likely you are to be exploited economically. Ergo, “the American anthropology, the two horns of a bloody dilemma on which the democratic experiment has balanced for 240 years,” Fountain writes. “Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.” If the boot is on my neck now then it must have been removed from someone else’s neck.“Twice in its history the United States has had to reinvent itself,” Fountain writes, “in order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy.” Those instances were the Civil War and the Great Depression. In the first instance, “the land literally burned … either the country would be reinvented as a profoundly different social order — with a redistribution of freedom … a resetting of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation — or it would be broken in two.”The Great Depression forced a second reckoning: FDR’s New Deal countered what Fountain describes as “the threat that unbridled industrial capitalism posed for democracy.” In other words, if you are owned by your employer, with no bargaining power and no safety net if you fall, you are a slave in “a new kind of bondage, a shell democracy that maintained the forms of political equality while abetting an economic system that denied the great mass of people meaningful agency over their lives.”Fountain believes we are now faced with the choice of a third reinvention or the death of the American Dream, in essence a crisis point of existential threat no less pivotal than the two previous reinventions.As Jon Meacham, historian and author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (and many other books), says, “Sometimes it takes a novelist to capture a world gone mad, and it’s difficult to imagine a better match for our times than Ben Fountain.” Agreed. Fountain has examined the symptoms, analyzed the data, and offered a diagnosis of what ails us: “Fear is the herpes of American politics: the symptoms bloom and fade, but the virus never dies.” (Thanks for that image.)If you’ve been paying attention, there is no new information in Beautiful Country Burn Again; if you haven’t been paying attention, then brace yourselves. Reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson without the ’ludes, Fountain writes in a colloquial style, telling unvarnished home-truths with an outraged, acerbic wit. He has a gift for getting at the essence of a thing, recognizing Trump as a combination of J.R. Ewing and Tony Soprano, his presidency a reality-TV program taken to its logical extreme.Fountain conducts a consciousness-raising session and a deep-dive of a history lesson in electoral politics. He demonstrates cause and effect in clear, concise, and persuasive prose—no magic here. No one escapes; Fountain takes the Republicans to task as well as Democrats, closing Beautiful Country Burn Again in urgent tones with an inspiring moral case for what could be. Don’t skip the footnotes; they include authorial commentary, sometimes in French, as well as the citations.The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time, Beautiful Country Burn Again. Possibly the most chilling sentence in Fountain’s new book is, “This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self.” Is the result of the 2016 election a product of our natural selves? I do not want this to be who we are.As disturbing and enraging as Fountain’s subject is, it’s a pleasure to read long-form journalism by a gifted fiction writer. I hope he does it again.Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.