George Packer is an old-fashioned muckraker in 21st Century America. But unlike those crusading journalists a century ago who tackled a single issue like child labor or slaughter houses, Packer takes on the whole country. He probes far and wide to find out what’s rotten in the U.S.A., defines the problem broadly and through individual stories, connects the dots and pulls no punches. Throughout, his work has the ring of truth.

His territory is the soft underbelly of America—not the fruited plains or bombs bursting in air of an idealized America—where greed, cynicism, political bankruptcy and broken dreams find solid nourishment. Packer doesn’t have any real press-stopping news, but he delves deeply into contemporary issues in a way few journalists can and comes up with some positively frightening scenarios—snapshots, as it were, of the galloping cancer that eats at the bowels of America.

Wall Street, Washington, Tampa, Silicon Valley, the banks, Wal-Mart and Big Pharma are some of the targets in Packer’s crosshairs. He portrays an America where only fools and suckers believe in its mythology of equality, justice, economic fairness, good government and apple pie.

Thus, The Unwinding of our social and civic contract, our simple decency, our Bill of Rights and just about every institution intended to sustain a humanist democracy. In contemporary America, “We’re all in this together” has been supplanted by, “Every man (woman and child) for himself.”

This book raises the question whether it is possible to have a true democracy supported by a capitalist economic system.

In surveying this scene, it is not enough for the reader to ask, “Would the Founding Fathers approve?” but rather “Would the Founding Fathers believe what has happened?”