George Packer

George Packer (2013)

George Packer (born August 13, 1960 in Santa Clara , California ) is an American writer and journalist. He is best known for his journalistic work for The New Yorker , which focuses on United States foreign policy. His non-fiction book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America , won the 2013 National Book Award in the non-fiction category and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award .

Childhood and upbringing

Packer was born in California in 1960. Packer's parents Herbert and Nancy Packer, née Huddleston, both worked as scientists at Stanford University . His maternal grandfather, George Huddleston , and an uncle were intermittent members of the House of Representatives. Packer graduated from Yale College in 1982. He was briefly used for the Peace Corps in Togo . His sister Ann Packer is also a writer. George Packer is married to Laura Secor for the second time.

Professional career

Packer's essays and articles have been published in Boston Review , The Nation , World Affairs , Harper’s, and The New York Times , among others . He was also a columnist for Mother Jones and has been a permanent contributor to The New Yorker since 2003 .

Packer was also a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin .

His nonfiction book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (2005) examines the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he later reported on further developments in that country. Packer is one of the people who advocated the invasion. His play "Betrayed: A Play" (2008), which also deals with the war in Iraq, premiered in Germany in 2009 at the Staatstheater Karlsruhe under the title "Betrayed", directed by Johannes Lepper.

In The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013), he combines his accounts of economic, cultural and political events in the United States by detailing the biographies of three people: an industrial worker from Youngstown , Ohio who is becoming a social worker , a North Carolina biodiesel entrepreneur, a lobbyist in Washington. He goes into similar detail on people affected by the collapse of the real estate market in Tampa , Florida, and also on entrepreneur Peter Thiel , who was instrumental in the success of PayPal and Facebook . Interspersed between these longer reports are ten shorter biographical sketches of famous Americans such as the rapper Jay-Z , the writer Raymond Carver , the Republican Newt Gingrich, and the restaurant owner Alice Waters .

Awards and nominations

• 2013 National Book Award in the non-fiction category.
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award : Nominated in the non-fiction category.

Publications

• The Village of Waiting (1988). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1st Farrar edition, 2001). Pb. ISBN 0-374-52780-6 .
• The Half Man (1991). Random House, ISBN 0-394-58192-X .
• Central Square (1998). Graywolf Press, ISBN 1-55597-277-2 .
• Blood of the Liberals (2000). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-25142-8 .
• The Fight is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (2003, as editor). Harper Perennial. Paperback, ISBN 0-06-053249-1 .
• The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (2005). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005, ISBN 0-374-29963-3 .
• Betrayed: A Play (2008). Faber & Faber.
• Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). ISBN 978-0-374-17572-6 .
• The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013). ISBN 978-0-374-10241-8 .
  • German by Gregor Hens : The settlement: An inner history of the new America. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-000157-3 .
• Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century , Cape 2019.

Web links

• Article by George Packer in The New Yorker
• Article by George Packer in Foreign Affairs
• Article by George Packer in The New York Times
• George Packer in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Single receipts

1. ↑ http://www.californiabirthindex.org/
2. ^ David Glenn: Unfinished Wars. ( November 5, 2005 memento on the Internet Archive ) Columbia Journalism Review , September 2005.
3. ↑ Portrait of the author on the staff pages of the New Yorker [1]
4. ^ The winding up of old America , Deutschlandfunk, October 19, 2014
5. ↑ Clare Swanson: 2013 National Book Awards Go to McBride, Packer, Szybist, Kadohata . In: Publishers Weekly . November 20, 2013. Retrieved December 3, 2013.
6. ↑ 2013 winners ( English ) In: nationalbook.org . Retrieved April 14, 2019.
7. ↑ Kirsten Reach: NBCC finalists announced . In: Melville House Publishing . January 14, 2014. Retrieved January 14, 2014.
8. ↑ Admin: Announcing the National Book Critics Awards Finalists for Publishing Year 2013 . National Book Critics Circle. January 14, 2014. Retrieved January 14, 2014.
9. ↑ Review: Michael Hochgeschwender , The American dream is over. FAZ , August 5, 2014, p. 10 (feature section)
10. ↑ Our Man by George Packer review - Richard Holbrooke and American power , May 2, 2019, The Guardian , accessed August 26, 2019