Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland and the novels True Believers, Heyday andTurn of the Century, among other books. He contributes to The New York Times and was host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and design critic for Time, New York and The New Yorker. He graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn.
“This is the one book everyone must read as we figure out how to
rebuild our country. With lucid writing and head-snapping insights,
Kurt Andersen explores how a confederacy of the right and big
business, with unabashed greed, deliberately reengineered our
economy. To fix that will require understanding the roots of the
problem. A triumph.”—Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker:
Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
“Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Andersen brilliantly
exposes how nostalgia—the strategic oversimplification of our
past—has erased complexity and friction from our country’s
narrative to serve a single goal: to preserve the status quo for
the benefit of those in power. Evil Geniuses documents how history
and nostalgia are engaged in hand-to-hand combat that may determine
our future.”—Ken Burns, director of The Civil War and The
Roosevelts: An Intimate History
“How did the United States turn from its longstanding egalitarian
ideals to its present course of socially and morally catastrophic
inequality? Kurt Andersen interrogates the past half century with
characteristic intellectual ambition and literary bravado to find
out. At once cultural history, memoir, and riff, Evil Geniuses
explains how our country found its way into this predicament, and
how we might yet get out of it.”—Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush
Tragedy and Ronald Reagan
“Evil Geniuses is a vivid catalog of American sociopolitical
history—a dedicated deep dive into this country’s paradoxical
legacy of innovation and ego, with Andersen as its clear-eyed,
masterful archivist.”—Rebecca Carroll, WNYC cultural critic and
host of the podcast Come Through
“Back when the idea of President
Reagan still seemed a stretch and President
Trump was barely a joke, some serious,
smart, committed people with vast appetites and little
shame—right-wing intellectuals and billionaires, CEOs and
Washington hustlers—launched a long war to create a paradigm shift
and rewrite our social contract to their benefit. Andersen’s
dazzling, mind-bending, must-read chronicle of that fifty-year
crusade explains how it happened, why it succeeded, and,
unsettlingly, what that victory means: America is
now theirs.”—John Heilemann, co-founder and executive
editor, The Recount
“Wow. Evil Geniuses is engaging, enraging, enthralling, appalling;
a true tour de force. And most of all, it’s the truth—about how
these rapacious bastards have picked this country’s bones for the
last fifty years, and what the rest of us need to do to turn the
tables. Exactly the book we need right now.”—Michael Tomasky, Daily
Beast columnist and author of If We Can Keep It
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