About this Event
Join us for the Brooklyn launch of award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Janet Reitman's The Inheritance, a stunning work of narrative nonfiction that traces the lives of nine Americans over three decades, offering a vivid account of a nation in crisis.
Janet Reitman will read from The Inheritance, followed by conversation, audience Q&A, signing, and reception.
here!
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About the book
A thrill-seeking former Navy pilot chases adventure in Afghanistan, while in suburbia, his teenage son spirals into extremism. The grandson of African freedom fighters joins the FBI to save America from terrorism and ends up terrorizing the African immigrants he’d sworn to protect. A young Marine who sees himself as a true-blue American goes to war in Iraq, comes home broken, and is reborn as white nationalist. An idealistic young attorney defends a Palestinian engineer she believes is wrongly accused of funding Hamas. These four people, and five others, struggle to find their way in a country reimagining itself in the wake of 9/11.
In The Inheritance, Janet Reitman, the bestselling author of Inside Scientology, delivers an intimate and urgent account of American disillusionment—and a paean to hope. From the bucolic suburbs of Boston to the immigrant enclaves of Dallas, from the deserts of Iraq to the encrypted chatrooms that fuel hatred and extremism, The Inheritance unfolds in repeating narratives of people moving through the decades, from the end of the Reagan era to the present day, painting a sweeping and deeply affective portrait of how a country revered for its democratic ideals became a nation defined by its fears.
Rigorously reported and brimming with novelistic detail, The Inheritance reveals the hidden cost of the war on terror, exposing the psychic wounds that haunt us to this day.
Advance Praise for The Inheritance
“An extraordinarily incisive—and bracing—study of the American dream gone awry . . . Rendered in a gripping, novelistic style, Reitman’s finely wrought subjects carry the reader steadily deeper into the nation’s ‘burnt over’ landscapes, forlorn places of extremism and paranoia, of alienation and despair. With understated power and authority, The Inheritance casts the smug, rose-tinted notion of American exceptionalism in a wholly new and devastating light.”—Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings
“The Inheritance is a symphonic dirge, brilliantly composed, intimate and haunting, about the human toll of American self-destruction in the age of terror.”—George Packer, NBA-winning author of The Unwinding and The Emergency
“This vast, intimate, heartbreaking book should change the way we read and think and tell stories about what it means to be an American, or to live in the United States, decades or centuries into our vexed condition. Here is a writer meeting the moment. Here are everyday people stepping up and breaking down and twisting inward and, sometimes, beginning to see. The Inheritance is beautifully made, profoundly reported—a mighty book from which I could not look away.”—Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family
About the author
Janet Reitman is an award-winning journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, she has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and was a fellow at the New America Foundation. Reitman’s previous book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book.
About Peter Maass
Peter Maass is the author of the award-winning Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War and Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. He reported on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and won the Deadline Club Arts Reporting Award for a series of articles in The Intercept. Maass has taught writing at Princeton University and Columbia University, and was a Visiting Regents Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, his alma mater. He is currently working on a biography of Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg—his great-great grandfather and great grandfather—and their involvement in Jewish immigration to British-controlled Palestine, forthcoming from Grand Central.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States
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