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Audiobook16 hours
Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall—and Those Fighting to Reverse It
Written by Steven Brill
Narrated by Dan Woren
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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About this audiobook
In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half century, America's core values-meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself-have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction. They have isolated our best and brightest, whose positions at the top have never been more secure or more remote.
The result has been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and forces behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial engineering, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the question on everyone's mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to those working quietly and effectively to repair the damages. At once a diagnosis of our national ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for a brighter future, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism-and a welcome antidote to political despair.
The result has been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and forces behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial engineering, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the question on everyone's mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to those working quietly and effectively to repair the damages. At once a diagnosis of our national ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for a brighter future, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism-and a welcome antidote to political despair.
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Author
Steven Brill
Steven Brill is the founder of Journalism Online, a company designed to create a new, viable business model for journalism to flourish online. He is a feature writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME. Brill founded the Yale Journalism Initiative, which recruits and trains journalists. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, and Brill's Content Magazine. He is the author of After: How America Confronted the September 12th Era and The Teamsters.
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