The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich
By Evan Osnos
From New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author Evan Osnos comes a timely and provocative collection of essays exploring American oligarchy and the culture of excess, providing a wry, unfiltered look at how the ultrarich shape—and warp—our social and political landscape.
“The Gilded Age had Mark Twain, the Jazz Age had F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Age of Trump luckily, has Evan Osnos.
In The Haves and Have Yachts, Osnos reveals the secret lives and preoccupations of America’s increasingly powerful oligarchs and probes their outsized impact on the rest of us.
Osnos is an astute political reporter and a wonderful and witty stylist, making this menagerie of modern-day Robber Barons equal parts entertaining and appalling. Anyone trying to understand who really rules Trump’s America must read it.”
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Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury
By Evan Osnos
During a decade abroad, I often found myself making a case for America, urging the citizens of China, Egypt, or Iraq to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity. When Sarabeth and I returned in 2013, we found each of these principles under assault. I wanted to understand why. So I started going back to three places I know firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Over the next six years, I followed some ordinary individuals navigating the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America, reaching a crescendo in a time of pandemic, political turmoil, and the pursuit of racial justice.
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Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now
By Evan Osnos
Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered.
In this concise and trenchant examination, Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award, draws on his writings for The New Yorker to capture Biden’s lifelong quest for the American presidency. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy—a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.
“[From] an immensely talented reporter for The New Yorker, Joe Biden ably takes the measure of the man and the politician, presenting a picture of the Democratic nominee that is in a few ways unexpected. ”
About Age of Ambition
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.
As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
“In the pages of the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new China better than any other writer from the West or East. In “Age of Ambition,” Osnos takes his reporting a step further, illuminating what he calls China’s Gilded Age, its appetites, challenges and dilemmas, in a way few have done.”
About the Author
Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering politics and foreign affairs. From 2005 to 2013, he lived in Beijing, which is the basis for his book "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Faith and Truth in the New China." It was awarded the National Book Award in 2014. He lives in Washington, D.C.
