Note: This is an encore edition of Reader's Corner. The episode originally aired in February 2021.
When did America give up on fairness? Kurt Andersen's Book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn?
This deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right, a complacent and complicit Establishment; and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself. Author Walter Isaacson called Evil Geniuses “the one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country.”
Kurt Andersen is author of Fantasyland, Heyday and Turn of the Century, and frequently writes for New York and Vanity Fair. He recently concluded 20 years as host of the Peabody Award–winning public radio program Studio 360, which he cocreated. He was cofounder of Spy magazine, and has been a columnist and critic for the New Yorker and Time.
