Another take on "what's with these people?"

National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos' contribution to the question -- what's with these people? -- received a lot of plaudits when released in 2018. He describes Wildland: The Making of America's Fury as "a book about public life, revealed in private experiences." As with the book in toto, that description seems both accurate and elegant.

After a decade reporting from such places as Baghdad, Egypt, and China, he came home to live in Washington, D.C. His native land felt unfamiliar.

This book is a crucible, a period bounded by two assaults on the country's sense of itself, the attack on New York and Washington, on September 11, 2001, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021. It is a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the nation as larger than the sum of its parts. A century and a half after the Civil War, America was again a cloven nation. Its ability was foundering on fundamental tensions over the balance between individual freedom and the protection of others, over the reckoning with injustice, and over a basic test of any political society: Whose life matters?...

I spent a decade in parts of the world where people tend to be skeptical about American promises and values, and I often found myself making a case for the United States, urging citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to believe that, for all of America's failings, it aspires to some basic moral commitments, including the rule of law, the force of truth, and the right to pursue a better life. When I returned to the United States, I began to wonder if I had been lying all those years to people around the world -- and to myself....

Osnos rooted this deeply reported book among people in three locations where he had lived and worked: Greenwich Conn., where he grew up professional class in proximity to hedge funder millionaires; Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he'd broken in as a green reporter in beautiful, mutilated land in a dying coal town on a dying local newspaper; and Chicago, where his immigrant grandfather was shot in a street mugging and where his immigrant family had nonetheless taken root.

This is in many ways a lovely book. He cares about the people whose life travails provide his narrative. He certainly hopes through these revealed lives to provide a window on "what is with these people?"

I wanted to like the book; I certainly appreciated it. It is almost devastatingly well done. But (perhaps in part because I absorbed it in audio, read by Osnos himself) I came away more tired than enlightened. For me, the author's anguish overwhelmed his reportorial accomplishment. Your mileage might vary. I guess I'm a bit of a "what is to be done?" reader.