Homeland

Praise

“In 500 ambitious pages of pop culture, urban design, automotive trends, surveillance metadata and Batman, Beck constructs a sprawling portrait of why 9/11 is still at the heart of American life. . . . Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. . . . It’s impossible not to admire the nerve and scope of Beck’s treatise.”—The Washington Post

“It’s hard not to admire Beck’s ambition and the clarity of both his prose and his moral vision. Homeland is less an explanation of the precise ephemeral moment that is 2024 than an extended reckoning with a whole era of American history, one that will remain relevant to readers who didn’t live through the events it revisits.”—Book Forum

“Richard Beck, like many people alive today, has spent his adult life living in the shadow of 9/11, and Homeland is a devastating inquiry into the new world that day created. Many books have been written about Washington’s catastrophic response to the terrorists’ attacks. Beck is no less damning, but he is quieter, taking his time to tease out how endless war, moral cowardice, and historical illiteracy have clotted the capillaries of our intellectual and ethical life. Homeland is among the best books I’ve yet read on the afterlives of 9/11.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
 
“Homeland describes, with a beguiling mix of intellectual precision and passion, and from a novel perspective, the sinister mutations in American life induced by the war on terror. Everyone interested in the fate of democracy, or simply how violence abroad comes home, should read it.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present
 
“Homeland is a prodigious study, exposing how this war has permeated both the state and public spaces, all while propagating a culture of impunity within a government that has both committed and supported crimes against humanity.”—Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost and The Parisian
 
“Homeland is an immersive plunge into the icy tub of twenty-first-century American history as we’ve lived it so far. Beck puts the reader so deep in the action that you can hear the ‘U-S-A!’ chants. Chilling.”—Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“On 9/11 the United States lost its mind, succumbing to a protracted bout of hubris, ineptitude, and heedless violence. Today Americans are inclined to expunge from memory the disasters that ensued. Richard Beck refuses to forget. In this eloquent and insightful account, he tallies up the perverse consequences of our own folly. An extraordinary achievement.”—Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History

“Provocative . . . an exhilaratingly fresh take on what ails America.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review