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Beautiful Country Burn Again Audiobook Summary

In a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Fountain recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis

Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself.

Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, to our weaponized new conception of American exceptionalism, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump.

In an urgent and deeply incisive voice, Ben Fountain has fused history and the present day to paint a startling portrait of the state of our nation. Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.

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Beautiful Country Burn Again Audiobook Narrator

Ron Butler is the narrator of Beautiful Country Burn Again audiobook that was written by Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.

About the Author(s) of Beautiful Country Burn Again

Ben Fountain is the author of Beautiful Country Burn Again

Beautiful Country Burn Again Full Details

Narrator Ron Butler
Length 14 hours 33 minutes
Author Ben Fountain
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date September 25, 2018
ISBN 9780062864727

Subjects

The publisher of the Beautiful Country Burn Again is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Elections, Political Process, Political Science

Additional info

The publisher of the Beautiful Country Burn Again is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062864727.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Randy

July 08, 2018

Ben Fountain, author of the excellent, prize-winning novel "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk," takes us back to the absolute clusterfuck of the presidential campaign year of 2016. A gifted wordsmith who combines the detailed observational qualities of Tom Wolfe (minus the tons of exclamation marks), the righteous sense of injustice of Hunter S. Thompson (minus the drugs and alcohol), and the dead-on, sometimes scatological, character assessments of Matt Taibbi (“Donald Trump, plainly and simply, is full of shit.”), Fountain interweaves a series of thought-provoking essays together with an ongoing “Book of Days” recitation of the actual surreal monthly news (major and minor). His compelling argument is that America is facing a crisis that portends—even cries out for—a third reinvention (with the Civil War and Great Depression signaling the first two). This is not a Trump-bashing book: yes, Trump the candidate is honestly, accurately, and often humorously pegged as a serial liar, bully, and racist (pulling back the curtain on The Great Oz, and who hasn't?), but Hillary Clinton also takes her fair share of knocks here for being a part of the New Democrat movement that embraced corporate America at the expense of the working class. Ultimately, Fountain very persuasively and eloquently warns that democracy itself is at stake due to increasing income inequality, insular xenophobia, and resurgent racism (shamefully more openly acceptable thanks to Trump). Offering a timely and incisive critique of the American present that also makes an appeal to our better angels, Fountain--like James Baldwin before him--recognizes that the way forward will require a new revolution.

David

December 17, 2018

Ben Fountain, at the behest of The Guardian, is sent out on the campaign trail in the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election and finds himself at the Quicken Loans Arena for the Republican National Convention. Here he finds stern warnings against tennis balls. Tennis balls are definitely not allowed on the convention floor. Same goes for water guns, toy guns, tape, rope, umbrellas with metal tips and a dozen other items that are considered verboten. What are allowed are guns. In the open carry state of Ohio, guns are allowed on the convention floor. Clearly America has lost its mind.It's Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail and while Fountain saves much of his head-shaking ire for Trump, he's a non-partisan critic assessing Hillary as someone completely incapable of connecting with the middle-class and Ted Cruz who is determined to out-Jesus everyone else. He posits that the United States finds itself at a critical crossroads, one they've only been twice before during the Civil War and the Great Depression. In all cases, the country has had to completely reinvent itself to survive as a democracy. Fountain is one hell of a writer. In our current breakneck news cycle that sees fresh new dumpster fires everyday, looking back those few short years seems to make the most sense. It is an arms length view that still seems horribly prescient. Full length video review here: https://youtu.be/uQ1HHhujnXY

Michelle

September 17, 2018

POLITICS/GOVERNMENTBen FountainBeautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and RevolutionEcco BooksHardcover, 978-0-0626-8884-2 (also available as an e-book, audiobook, and large-print paperback), 448 pgs., $27.99September 25, 2018“Nautonomy: the asymmetrical production and distribution of life chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political participation.” —David Held, Democracy and the Global OrderBen Fountain pulls no punches. “This wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation,” he writes, “a creature comprised of degenerate political logic.”Where were you when you heard the news? You remember, don’t you, whether you thought the news was fantastic or catastrophic? I do; I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on a 787 bound for New Delhi. So, naturally, at 9 p.m. EST I began pestering the cabin crew for election news. The pilot resorted to announcing updates and when it was done, when the result was announced, I cried.I write this review on the day Paul Manafort pleads guilty to conspiracy against the United States.Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution is the first book of nonfiction from Ben Fountain, a former attorney, whose fiction is famous. You may not be familiar with Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a collection of short stories which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2007, but you cannot have avoided Fountain’s novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and became a film directed by Ang Lee — Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.“I was having feelings. They weren’t good feelings,” Fountain writes. “By Thanksgiving, 2015, these feelings had crystalized into a sense that something new and ugly was afoot in the land of the famously free.” So, The Guardian newspaper dispatched him to the campaign trail to “figure out what the hell was going on out there.” The result was a series of essays for the newspaper which eventually became Beautiful Country Burn Again.Much more than a simple expansion of that series of essays, this book is a triumph of reporting — a synthesis of research, interviews, observation, experience, and analysis producing a vital mix of politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. Fountain contextualizes the result with a “Book of Days,” preceding each chapter, which sets the global stage upon which the events of that chapter played themselves out.Fountain explores and explains and distills into what he calls the “American anthropology,” which is basically this: If we believe freedom is a finite thing, then the perception of a loss of freedom necessarily means that someone else has gained more freedom by taking it from us, and the less freedom you have, the more likely you are to be exploited economically. Ergo, “the American anthropology, the two horns of a bloody dilemma on which the democratic experiment has balanced for 240 years,” Fountain writes. “Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.” If the boot is on my neck now then it must have been removed from someone else’s neck.“Twice in its history the United States has had to reinvent itself,” Fountain writes, “in order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy.” Those instances were the Civil War and the Great Depression. In the first instance, “the land literally burned … either the country would be reinvented as a profoundly different social order — with a redistribution of freedom … a resetting of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation — or it would be broken in two.”The Great Depression forced a second reckoning: FDR’s New Deal countered what Fountain describes as “the threat that unbridled industrial capitalism posed for democracy.” In other words, if you are owned by your employer, with no bargaining power and no safety net if you fall, you are a slave in “a new kind of bondage, a shell democracy that maintained the forms of political equality while abetting an economic system that denied the great mass of people meaningful agency over their lives.”Fountain believes we are now faced with the choice of a third reinvention or the death of the American Dream, in essence a crisis point of existential threat no less pivotal than the two previous reinventions.As Jon Meacham, historian and author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (and many other books), says, “Sometimes it takes a novelist to capture a world gone mad, and it’s difficult to imagine a better match for our times than Ben Fountain.” Agreed. Fountain has examined the symptoms, analyzed the data, and offered a diagnosis of what ails us: “Fear is the herpes of American politics: the symptoms bloom and fade, but the virus never dies.” (Thanks for that image.)If you’ve been paying attention, there is no new information in Beautiful Country Burn Again; if you haven’t been paying attention, then brace yourselves. Reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson without the ’ludes, Fountain writes in a colloquial style, telling unvarnished home-truths with an outraged, acerbic wit. He has a gift for getting at the essence of a thing, recognizing Trump as a combination of J.R. Ewing and Tony Soprano, his presidency a reality-TV program taken to its logical extreme.Fountain conducts a consciousness-raising session and a deep-dive of a history lesson in electoral politics. He demonstrates cause and effect in clear, concise, and persuasive prose—no magic here. No one escapes; Fountain takes the Republicans to task as well as Democrats, closing Beautiful Country Burn Again in urgent tones with an inspiring moral case for what could be. Don’t skip the footnotes; they include authorial commentary, sometimes in French, as well as the citations.The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time, Beautiful Country Burn Again. Possibly the most chilling sentence in Fountain’s new book is, “This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self.” Is the result of the 2016 election a product of our natural selves? I do not want this to be who we are.As disturbing and enraging as Fountain’s subject is, it’s a pleasure to read long-form journalism by a gifted fiction writer. I hope he does it again.Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.

Mrs. Danvers

November 18, 2018

Beautifully written with a clear eye and commitment to facts. Also, we're fucked and I'm super depressed now.

Camille

December 24, 2018

I did enjoy this book, although I think the cover has some false advertising. This book is really an analysis of the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, putting into context with historical background. The first hundred pages or so were just the author describing four rallies he went to prior to the Iowa caucus (one each for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz) and I thought that part could have been about half the length and still had as much impact - so, if you are getting bogged down in the beginning, just skip to the next chapter and it'll go a lot quicker. Ben Fountain points out the racial overtones of this election, the Democratic Party's failure to come down to earth and pay attention to income inequality, and most of all, our disenfranchisement by a system he refers to as "nautonomy," a term which refers to a system of government in which we all have legal rights on paper but in reality, only a small elite has any true voice in government - no matter what the rest of us do, it has very little effect. We can start a petition, run for office, have a protest, boycott something, but even if we do all of this, we have far less control than someone who is part of that wealthy elite. He gives a lot of credit to the founding fathers for the documents they wrote which this country is supposedly based on, but I think too much credit is given because he doesn't seem to go into how even in their lifetimes those ideals were not really lived up to, least of all due to the fact that many of those founding fathers were slave owners and took part in the genocide of indigenous peoples. This book would be an excellent resource for anyone who is trying to understand the 2016 elections. Even though I lived through it, it brought a lot of that year back to me, most of it unpleasant memories of vitriolic interactions with complete strangers, especially while I was flyering for Jill Stein downtown. It had some weaknesses, as mentioned above, and it also did not talk about third parties (Libertarians or Greens) much at all except for mentioning them two or three times, but I did think most of his analysis was correct, and I felt that he did go to the root of the problem, which is that we are not really in a democracy. I wish there had been more writing about rebellion and revolution, since the title implied that was what the book was about, but I did think this was a solid analysis of what happened in that election and I would say it was worth reading.

Dan

November 08, 2018

Huge fan of Mr Fountain and his writing story thus far. This is a collection of articles written for the Guardian, so it suffers from that just in terms of not having an overarching narrative or conclusion that connects it all together. Where it excels is in its language, uncompromising and unwavering in its evisceration of both the banking sector ala Taibbi and good old fashioned American paranoia ala Hunter Thompson.Really enjoyed the foot notes and bibliography as well. A lot of good sources and things to add to the to-read shelf. Definitely will be moving up all of Didion’s work, as Fountain is a fan and cites her frequently.

Jonathan

October 27, 2018

Whether you’re Pro or Anti-Trump, 2016 was an interesting year in American politics. Ben Fountain attempts to capture that with a series of essays about that year and what they could mean for the US of A. Great read. Highly recommend.

Amy

November 04, 2018

Fountain utilizes historical context alongside a writer's eye for detail to create an incredibly compelling analysis of how we arrived at Trump and everything that goes with him. If your library doesn't have this book immediately available, buy it. You won't regret it.

John

November 08, 2018

Insightful and sharp. I need to memorize sections so that impress people with my astute observations about American politics.

Bruddy

March 09, 2019

As other readers have commented, Ben Fountain's writing resembles Tom Wolfe's in its intelligent and often hilarious descriptions of people and places. For this alone, Beautiful Country Burn Again, an account of the 2016 primary season is worth reading. Fountain clearly articulates the moral failings of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Before reading this book I already knew that Trump was a habitual liar and that Clinton and her staff had rigged the Democratic primaries to block Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s nomination. But I wasn’t quite aware of the morally bankrupt cast of losers Trump surrounded himself with, or the degree to which Clinton shortchanged not just Sanders but the entire primary process by controlling the Democratic National Committee’s finances, strategy and polling data. Beautiful Country Burn Again left in me no doubt that had Bernie Sanders been treated fairly, he would have won the Democratic nomination and, most probably, have become our 45th president.That being said, this book is more an overview of the roots and causes of America's current political trauma than a direct support or criticism of any one political figure. Fountain states that only twice before in our country's history have we faced an existential crisis, during the Civil War and the Great Depression. In both cases, America was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive. He believes that the current political climate as evidenced by the 2016 presidential campaigns calls for another such reinvention without such America's very survival may be at stake.

Joanna

February 15, 2020

There’s also much going on here. Fountain is impressively well read and well informed, but also able to incorporate his knowledge into these essays without coming across as pretentious or even academic. As a stylist, he’s often audacious, but never misses his mark. His gonzo style pieces entertain without veering off into incoherence. However, I was most moved by his more serious pieces towards the end of the text. Currently, US political discourse feels like 300 people in a low ceilinged 100 capacity room, all of them shouting. He manages to cut through all this noise to articulate his vision of the dream of America, and exactly what’s at stake this year.

Holly

December 21, 2019

An absolutely horrifying, depressing, sometimes amusing and always compelling tale of how our idiot president got elected. How the social progress set in motion by FDR and continued by LBJ has been effectively dismantled. How our country is a complete mess for anyone who is poor, non-white, or burdened by conscience. It’s not just the republicans who are to blame, though without that party and their embrace of racism (going back decades) and Ayn Rand’s utter nonsense, it would have been difficult to create the same chaos we live in today. Everyone should read this book.

Jin

February 20, 2019

A timely read for a new election cycle.

Simon

October 14, 2020

VOTE!

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