Bad Stories

What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

By: Steve Almond

Narrated by: Steve Almond

Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices―from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin―to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people.

The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It's the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the hell happened to our country.

©2018 Steve Almond (P)2018 Red Hen Press, all rights reserved. Published by Brilliance Publishing, Inc.

Whatever you do, read this book

Steve Almond gets its. For our nation and our democracy to mature, we must acknowledge our vulnerabilities and minimize our grievances. Let Steve tell you the bad stories that brought us to this fractured state. Let Steve remind you that it’s all within our reach to fix, if we only apply some mercy to ourselves and to our fellow citizens.

Absolutely everyone should read this

Enlightning and tactful. A must read!
I want to share this with soooo many people.