“Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Journalist Evan Osnos, who has spent much of his career covering global turmoil for “The New Yorker,” has now turned his attention to his own country. In his new book called “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury,” Osnos compares the U.S. to a dried-out forest where, after years of political institutional failure, a single spark can erupt into a raging inferno. And Evan Osnos, welcome to the program with that image in viewers’ minds right now. It is really interesting that you spend so much of your career focused internationally to come home to a country that was basically unrecognizable. And it reminded me a lot of what we heard from President Bush over the weekend at the 9/11 — the 20 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when he kept talking about the America that he knew.

EVAN OSNOS, AUTHOR, “WILDLAND: THE MAKING OF AMERICA’S FURY”: Yes, very much so, actually, Bianna. He — when he was talking about it, I think a lot of us had that sense of a kind of moment of awareness of really how much ground has been covered and the things that we feel like we have lost in those 20 years since 9/11. He talked about children of the same foul spirit, by which he meant, in a sense, this idea of these intolerances, these rejections of things that I think we used to take for granted. And, fundamentally, the way I have come to see it is that the thing that I noticed most when I came back, after all these years away, was that we seem to have lost this very specific American tendency to see ourselves as a country, as larger than the sum of our parts. That piece of it seems to have sort of fallen through our fingers. And the project before us now is to say, how do we get that back?

GOLODRYGA: And you highlight three Americans, we should note, not in Washington, D.C. One’s a hedge funder in Greenwich, Connecticut. Another was a war veteran in West Virginia, and another was a man who was convicted of teen gang-related crimes in Chicago. Why did you specifically seek these three stories out?

OSNOS: These are three places that mean a lot to me. They’re all places where I have lived in my life. Greenwich, Connecticut, after all, is where I grew up as a kid. It was just an extraordinarily fortunate place to grow up, outside of New York City. It’s always been prosperous. And over the last 20 years, it has sort of, in many ways, become a place that is — it’s known as the hedge fund capital of the world. And it’s a place where you can learn a lot about what the impact of the financialization of the economy has been in America. Clarksburg, West Virginia, is a small city in the northern part of the state, very different from Greenwich, very different from Chicago. It’s the place where I worked as a young journalist, my first job out of college, and it’s also a place that for years has sent people off to fight abroad in American wars. And, in fact, if you go back to Clarksburg now, you can begin to understand some of the impacts that the wars have had at home, people going overseas for repeated deployments. And you see it right there on the front page of the little newspaper, “The Exponent Telegram,” where I started my career.