The United States of Anger: People and the American Dream

by Gavin Esler

United States of Anger.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published May 28, 1998

About the author

Gavin Esler is an award winning television and radio broadcaster, novelist and journalist. He is the author of five novels and two non-fiction books, The United States of Anger, and most recently Lessons from the Top, a study of how leaders tell stories to make other people follow them. It’s based on personal encounters with a wide variety of leaders, from Bill Clinton and Angela Merkel to Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and even cultural leaders such as Dolly Parton.

Reviewers have been full of praise for Esler’s fiction and story-telling abilities. The writer Bernard Cornwell said his novels are "made luminous with wisdom, sympathy and story telling." The Guardian commented that Esler's fiction displays "undoubted sympathy for the human condition and a burning anger, a genuine lyricism, a quick sensitivity and a real understanding of other people." The Financial Times said Esler's stories of people in power and the compromises they are forced to make, shows that he "understands the political beast better than anyone."

Gavin EslerGavin Esler was born in Glasgow, and brought up in Edinburgh and Northern Ireland. His family are descended from German Protestant refugees who fled to safety in Scotland during the religious wars of the early 17th Century. He spent the first three years of his life living with his parents, grandmother and aunts in a three-bedroom council house in Clydebank. The family moved to Edinburgh and Gavin won a scholarship to George Heriot's School. He planned to study medicine at Edinburgh University and then, to the relief of patients everywhere, made an abrupt switch to English, American and, eventually, Irish literature. After he finished his post-graduate studies he was offered a job on The Scotsman in Edinburgh but turned it down as likely to be a bit dull, preferring instead The Belfast Telegraph. He moved on to the BBC in Belfast during some of the worst of "the Troubles," and got to know leaders of the IRA and other Republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. On one occasion the leader of a loyalist organisation introduced himself to Esler with the memorable words: “I am speaking to you as someone deeply involved in violence.” It turned out to be an accurate description.

His investigative work on the wrongful convictions of Giuseppe Conlon and his son Gerry led to a campaign which eventually overturned the convictions of the so-called “Guildford Four” and “Maguire Seven” -- innocent Irishmen and women convicted of bombing offences on the basis on non-existent or unreliable “evidence.” Their stories eventually became the basis of the film, In the Name of the Father.

Esler moved on to become the BBC's Chief North America Correspondent, based in Washington and covering the Bush and Clinton White House. He visited 48 of the 50 states but somehow missed out on Wisconsin and North Dakota. His first encounter with Bill Clinton in 1991 led him to believe that the then Governor of Arkansas might indeed become President of the United States some day - a belief somewhat dented when a Democratic party official described Clinton to Esler as “Oh, you mean Governor Zipper Problem.”

He then reported from countries as diverse as China, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Russia, Jordan, Iran, Saudia Arabia and from the Aleutian Islands, as well as all across Europe. He won a Royal Television Society award for a TV documentary about Alaska and a Sony Gold award for a BBC radio investigation into the case of Sami al Hajj, who was detained without charge in Guantanamo bay, but released shortly after the radio programme was broadcast.

Over the past two decades Gavin Esler has interviewed world leaders ranging from Mrs Thatcher, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Chirac to President Clinton, President Carter, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, Ed Miliband and Israel's Shimon Peres. In the arts and culture programmes he anchors for BBC World he has als

Reviews

[Alistair Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is somewhat dated now being published the late 1990s. It is however a lucid and prescient read which in 2024 is in some respects bang on the money. Gavin Esler journeys around America looking at the disconnect between politicians and the people, the ills inherent in American society, race relations, the absurd claims of victimhood by each and every group, the corrosive role of lawyers, the impact of the religious right and Muslims, the degree to which certain elements genuingly despised the then President Bill Clinton and also the hope at the centre of American life.
This book is still worth a read today, some of Eslers fears have come to pass, the polarisation of politics, the poison of Trump and racial division but the Republic has just about survived.
What is clear is that the political system in America is hopelessly corrupted by big money, vested interests, lies , but was it ever thus.
Recommended.

[Josiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 25 year old book that, by removing all the references to the 90's, could have been written today.

I bought this book on a whim while visiting Edinburgh from a picturesque used bookstore tucked away in a narrow stairway. I seem to remember I thought it would be quaint, reading a reactionary book about America by an uptight Brit. This was the time of the Tea Party in America, and while concerning, they also were more on the problematic but quaint side of the equation.

It took me a decade to read it.

I couldn't have been more wrong, but it's good that I waited until my view of the American problem was more clearly illuminated.

While the book has its share of comical 90s hangups - such as a hatred of lawyers - and laser like focus on indicidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing and other types of domestic madness, its also has a clarity that seemed to have dissipated after 9/11 and the War on Terror. Things are real messed up in the US of A y'all.

He has numerous observations that I've seen in the post Trump era, but he manages to pull them out two decades earlier. He essentially predicts Trump. 

There's not really time to hit on all the sort of - predictions and thoughts in this book - they are many and intertwined. Overall prophetic, but in other ways not. In short, the dire concerns of the book have largely already come true. The many paradoxical cultural and structural problems are finally having effects impossible to ignore. Yet he really had concerns about race war and, I hope, this country has largely woken up to the many issues with minorities and if there's anything resembling that its because white supremacists decide to punish us all.

And in that sense, the book has quite a few problems due to its age. There's no compassion for drug addiction or people who get a bad shake in life. This is a world of "try harder." Further, while things are petty bad right now much like the book predicts, culturally and socially people who are not caught up in white supremacist culture wars - including our capitalist system - has started to wake up in ways that the author could never have seen or understand.

Which makes me hopeful. 

With a lot of work, change can happen, and sometimes in ways you could never see or predict because you're too stuck in your time and culture. Still, the United States of Anger is prophetic. We're not out of the swamp yet and there is a lot of work to do.

[Jim Thornton]

Good...t this was written 14 years ago and was interesting therefore in a recent historical context - and also how many of the observations have crossed the atlantic.