George Packer : The Unwinding – Part 1
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Weekly Reading Analysis (George Packer Book)
Directions: After reading the book and taking one to two pages of reading notes, type out your answers in the spaces below. Your answers should be single spaced and not exceed the two pages provided.
Summarize the book in two sentences. What is the author’s argument about this topic?
Thus far, Packer’s book is about the unwinding that America goes through every so often; this unwinding brings about a change in American’s perspective of everything. The changing views and standings within politics and business change drastically, allowing the underdog to come out on top.
Packer argues that this unwinding is natural and is needed; if this change doesn’t occur we would never have these monumental moments that American history is made of. We are actually very dependent on the fickleness of American’s.
In other words, with which books does the author engage? How does the author set their work apart from others?
Packer’s book is different from let’s say, Edwards, because of the style it is written in. Most historical works are written so that events are being told to you, which Packer does do, but he makes the stories come off as just that, as stories. His writings is almost like a story a friend would be telling you that they heard about. The way that he is able to capture a man’s life in such a short amount of time is also quite different; most writers take pages and pages to discuss the life of a person, but Packer takes maybe ten pages which really isn’t anything.
How does the author structure the book? What are the individual chapters about? How do the chapters built on the book’s argument(s)? What sources does the author use?
Packer structures the book in several ways. First, the book is divided into parts, within those parts there is sections that are titled after a year, and then within each year there is several people that are talked about. The “individual chapter” which would be the year 1978, was overall just an introduction to three different men, and how they rose from humble beginnings and became men with money and stature in a changing America. The three men discussed in this chapter were Dean Price, Newt Gingrich, and Jeff Connaughton.
What does the author do well? What criticisms do you have?
I like how Packer tells each man’s story in such great detail; it gives each section the feel of a fiction book even though it is non-fiction. I also liked the intro page that has the year on it, I didn’t necessarily understand what was being said at first, but then I caught on that it was a page filled with different headlines or events from that year. The only criticism