Shtshow!: The Country's Collapsing . . . and the Ratings Are Great, Hardcover

Descriere

A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie Le Duff was there In the Fall of 2013, long before any sane person had seriously considered the possibility of a Trump presidency, Charlie Le Duff sat in the office of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and made a simple but prophetic claim: The American people were at breaking point. The country was going broke and on high boil. No one in the bubbles of Washington, DC., New York, or Los Angles was talking about it--least of all the media. Le Duff wanted to go to the heart of the country to report what was really going on. Ailes baulked. Could the hard-living and straight-shooting Le Duff be controlled? But, then, perhaps on a whim, he agreed. And so Le Duff set out to record a TV series called, ``The Americans,`` and, along the way, ended up bearing witness to the ever-quickening unraveling of The American Dream. For three years, Le Duff travelled the width and breadth of the country with his team of production irregulars, ending up on the Mexican border crossing the Rio Grande on a yellow rubber kayak alongside undocumented immigrants; in the middle of Ferguson as the city burned; and watching the children of Flint get sick from undrinkable water. Racial, political, social, and economic tensions were escalating by the day. The inexorable effects of technological change and globalization were being felt more and more acutely, at the same time as wages stagnated and the price of housing, education, and healthcare went through the roof. The American people felt defeated and abandoned by their politicians, and those politicians seemed incapable of rising to the occasion. The old way of life was slipping away, replaced only by social media, part-time work, and opioid addiction. Shtshow is that true, tragic,