Böcker av Jeff Sharlet

Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us.This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA's Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin's Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips.Early readers have called this book "incantatory," the voice "prophetic," in "James Agee's tradition of looking at the reality of American lives." Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers-night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins-This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?

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.

The author of the New York Times bestseller The Family returns with a blistering investigation of the true influence and reach of fundamentalism in American politics.