The "Unwinding" moves deftly back and forth through the lives of its people, inc
luding Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a n
ew economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the industrial
Midwest attempting to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a poli
tical careerist in Washington; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire. Th
eir stories are interspersed with biographical sketches of the era's leading pub
lic figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs, to create a rich, wise and very h
uman portrait of the USA in these hard times. The "Unwinding" portrays a superpo
wer coming apart at the seams, its elites and institutions no longer working, le
aving ordinary people to improvise their own schemes for salvation.
