**Instant New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly bestseller!**

Evil Geniuses

The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

Why did America give up on fairness 40 years ago? How was our good U.S. economic system re-engineered to benefit the elite at the expense of the majority? And will technology keep making inequality and insecurity even worse or provide a 21st century digital escape route? In Evil Geniuses, novelist and historian Kurt Andersen tells the story in riveting detail of how late 20th century Americans were hoodwinked, and the country dragged back in time to a second Gilded Age of robber barons and unchecked big business where only the rich get richer and only market values matter. And now, at this historic do-or-die inflection point, he charts a way back to the future and a new, improved America.

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Notes & Sources for Evil Geniuses

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"A work of towering importance, and it provides that rarest of commodities right now: hope. Evil Geniuses offers the keys to the kingdom of taking back America. It couldn't be more timely. Pay heed."

“[An] essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn’t-know new book...a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change [that] carefully, meticulously, overwhelmingly, argues through facts. As he makes this wide-ranging case, Andersen never loses the texture of actual human beings. He is a graceful, authoritative guide, and he has a Writer-with-a-capital-W’s ability to defamiliarize the known."

Anand Giridharadas, the New York Times Book Review

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"The book is terrifically entertaining and engaging. The elements he is able to pull together and weave into a narrative that so convincingly pinpoints how we arrived at this moment are consistently novel and interesting."

—John Warner, The Chicago Tribune

"Kurt Andersen, with a rare talent, has written a history book like a police procedural that tracks the murder of a country, an economic and moral decline that began just when the U.S. was becoming more fair and equal…So good, it should be assigned reading."

Heather Mallick, The Toronto Star

"A great, really important, exceptionally well-done, extraordinarily timely book. It's brilliant, and the best summation of how we got here that I've ever read."

David Rothkopf, Deep State Radio

**"Evil Geniuses is engaging, enraging, enthralling, appalling; a true tour de force. And most of all, it's the truth. Exactly the book we need right now."**

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast columnist, author of If We Can Keep It

“This is the one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country. A triumph.”

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci

**“Evil Geniuses is a vivid catalog of American socio-political history...with Andersen as its clear-eyed, masterful archivist.”**

Rebecca Carroll, host of WNYC’s Come Through, author of Surviving the White Gaze

“A dazzling, mind-bending, must-read chronicle.”

John Heilemann, host of Showtime's The Circus, author of Game Change and Double Down

Kurt is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland , as well as the bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me , True Believers , Heyday , and Turn of the Century . He co-founded Spy magazine and co-created and hosted Studio 360 , a Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast about art and pop culture that aired from 2000 to 2020 . He’s also a journalist — former New Yorker columnist and staff writer, Time critic and columnist, New York editor-in-chief and columnist — and has written as well for television, film and the stage.