Nominally Christian churches glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while others celebrate an ecstatic indulgence in hate, citing Scripture whilst preparing for civil war. Lonely men gather to rage against women. There, too, in the undertow, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on 6 January at the US Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.

Both political inquiry and meditation, as poetic as it is profound and disturbing, The Undertow captures a decade of growing division in the US: roughly 2011-2021. Jeff Sharlet examines currents of gender, faith and money that brought us to the "Trumpocene", and finally, explores a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism. Beginning and closing with freedom songs of the past whose critique of American failures are nonetheless a vision of American possibility.

About the Author
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times best-selling author or editor of eight books, including The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, adapted into a Netflix documentary series. His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International's Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper's Magazine; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where he lives in the woods with many animals.

Reviews
"A riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America." -- Joseph O'Neill - The New York Times Book Review
"[Sharlet's] stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it's a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary...[The Undertow] has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade. " -- Ann Neumann - The Guardian
"[The Undertow] is journalism-as-art, attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present. Hopefully there will still be readers then. " -- Adam Fleming Petty - The Washington Post



Book Information
ISBN 9781324074519
Author Jeff Sharlet
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 286g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 140mm * 23mm