Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade

by George Packer

Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history. Interesting Times unites brilliant investigative pieces such as €œBetrayed,€ about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror,Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few keythemes the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal. Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalach

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Essays, Journalism

409 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2009

Reviews

[Bucket · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays Packer published during the first decade of this, the 21st, century. For Packer, the decade as a historical period, really began on the morning after September 11th, 2001 and ended on November 4, 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president of the U.S. The essays Packer chose for this collection are about the war in Iraq, other parts of the world where American influence was felt, "writers at war" (a group of essays focused on literary criticism and the opinions of writers about other writers), and the rise of a new liberalism that led to Obama's election.

Overall, I enjoyed Packer's essays and found the collection to form a pretty cohesive picture, perhaps with the exception of the Writers at War section. Though these essays were also well-written and related well to each other, they were disconnected from the rest of the essays in the book and interupted the general flow from war and American influence around the world to the new rise of liberalism. Perhaps this was purposeful and meant as a little interlude?

Anyway, the rest of the essays were full of depth and each one offered an insight into the state of things just 5-10 years ago. Packer characterizes the Iraq war as a "war for world opinion, a war of ideas" that we were very much losing, in part because we created "a revolution in the lives of Iraqis," releasing them, in effect, from a prison, but having no plan for what to do next and who would lead once they emerged. Packer laments that, unlike other wars and social movements in our history, "the Iraq war has had only the slightest effect on American culture, including pop culture."

My favorite quotation from the book characterizes something that we live daily during our increasingly polarized presidential elections, and that can easily be seen in the variety of contradictory 'facts' we find in the media and online:

"The more confusing and contradictory reality becomes, the more we cling to our fantasies of how things should be; facts, it turns out, can be far less stubborn things than opinions."

Packer goes on to state, in a later essay, that the globalization of media hasn't resulted in the "human bonds that were promised" and "have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place." Situations like Sierra Leone only come to our attention when a journalist writes a story, and even then our solutions are self-focused, such as trying to adopt away child victims from their parents instead of improving conditions in the country.

In discussing our changing political landscape, Packer emphasizes that freedom (cultural freedom under Democrats, economic freedom under Republicans) has been the most important theme since the 1960s. And somewhere along the way the Democrats lost out because voters stopped believing that "government could restore a sense of economic security." Only lately is this belief being revived.

Themes: politics, history, Iraq, U.S. policy, liberalism, public opinion

[Aidan Renaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Packer's journalism but it feels a little dated. The first half is great as each article on the Iraq War provides an interesting chronology of that debacle, but the back half is less interesting and the articles on 2008 feel so naive in hindsight. Not really a critique on the book, a lot just didn't age well.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting collection, and i like his writing, and have liked his past writings. but i'm not sure these essays will age terribly well. yes, they are a great capture of the politics of the time, but the politics of the time are not very interesting when, say, it's 2003 and we've just gone to war with iraq and the author is discussing the ways the war could go. interesting times, but better to leave those times in the past.