Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade »

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books, most recently Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight Is for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history. Interesting Times unites brilliant investigative pieces such as “Betrayed,” about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror,Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few keythemes recur: the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal.

Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalachia to Obama, these essays hold a mirror up to our own troubled times and showcase Packer’s unmistakable perspective, which is at once both wide-angled and humane.

The New York Times - Franklin Foer

This volume coheres better than most in the genre. That's because Packer has a far more coherent worldview than most reporters…Interesting Times seems an inapt title, ironic and detached in ways that Packer is simply not. But his is the good kind of attachment, self-aware and self-reflective. He writes, "One can only be honest about having a point of view while remaining open to aspects of reality—the human faces and voices—that might demolish it." In his best work, reality is haunting, indeed.

I After September 11

Living Up to It 3

Stop Making Sense 18

On the Morning After Saddam 23

A Democratic World 42

The Lesson of Tal Afar 57

Knowing the Enemy 92

Betrayed 114

Over Here 153

II Trouble Spots

The Children of Freetown 167

How Susie Bayer's T-shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama's Back 189

The Images in Our Heads 201

Gangsta War 204

The Moderate Martyr 224

The Megacity 243

Drowning 266

III Writers at War

V. S. Naipaul's Pursuit of Happiness 299

With Friends Like These 307

Graham Greene and the New Quiet Americans 317

The Spanish Prisoner 322

The Choice 335

The Fall of Conservatism 353

The Hardest Vote 375

The New Liberalism 394

Acknowledgments 411