When America Roared - by Jonathan Kaufman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The panoramic story of the 1980s, exploring the triumphs and failures of the decade that shaped the 21st century more than any other, from a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who witnessed the transformations firsthand

In January 1980, America seemed broken. Inflation raged. Interest rates topped 20 percent. Americans were held hostage in Iran. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with impunity. Japan was eating American manufacturing alive. Three networks controlled what Americans watched. China had been closed for 30 years.

Ten years later, everything had changed. The economy was booming. The Soviet Empire was collapsing. American businesses were competitive again.

In this immersive, character-driven narrative, Jonathan Kaufman lays bare the contending ideologies--and people--who battled for control of business, media and politics in the 1980s, shaping the way we live today. As Ronald Reagan and conservatives pummeled the Democratic party, as Jack Welch redefined leadership at Fortune 500 companies, and as deregulation spearheaded by Mark Fowler allowed television to become the hundreds of specialized and partisan channels we watch now, the groundwork was laid for our current economic and political conflicts. The decade also launched transformative social and political movements. Karen Nussbaum and Jane Fonda galvanized a struggling women's movement, Evan Wolfson spearheaded the gay community's legal fight against a hostile government, and Barack Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer in Chicago--all building long-lasting movements whose success progressives can learn from today.

From pivotal moments in board rooms and court rooms, to cultural touchstones like the birth of hip hop and of conservative talk radio, as well as the author's eyewitness experiences in Tiananmen Square and Prague, When America Roared is the riveting story of how the 1980s built the world we live in, for better and for worse. It is the decade that made us--and the key to understanding where we go from here.

Review Quotes

Praise for When America Roared

"This is an essential read: beautifully written, smartly argued, and thoroughly balanced. Just a few pages in, I realized that this was exactly the book I needed to understand our current moment."--Jonathan Eig, author of Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller King: A Life

"Take a fascinating journey back to the roaring Eighties with Jonathan Kaufman. In When America Roared he brings the most interesting figures from the decade back to life in a superb narrative that is instructive about how we got to the present era."--Jill Abramson, author of Merchants of Truth

"A superb guide to understanding how the world-changing events of the 1980s -- among them, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of Reaganism, the triumph of capitalism globally -- formed the foundation of our present moment. Jonathan Kaufman's thesis is a sobering, refreshing and well-crafted analysis about how we ended up where we are, whether we like it or not."--William D. Cohan, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards

Praise for The Last Kings of Shanghai

"The Last Kings of Shanghai is not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books

"Engrossing . . . Kaufman is an old China hand based on stints with the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, so he brings a reporter's eye for stories as a way of explaining so much more . . . It's a story that will excite readers."--Forbes

"The Last Kings of Shanghai examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties. In the end, if not in the beginning, they were, as Kaufman puts it, 'on the wrong side of history.' But now, thanks to him, they are at least part of history."--The Boston Globe

"A multigenerational epic of the Sassoon and Kadoorie dynasties, which rightly takes business out of the shadows and puts it at the heart of modern China's history . . . The author entertainingly contrasts the undisciplined Sassoons with the strict approach of Kadoorie and his sons Lawrence and Horace . . . The book is excellent too on China's tumultuous history . . . This work does a great service in putting business at the heart of a key development -- China's re-emergence."--Financial Times

"Few histories have been written about the Sassoons and Kadoories in part because the families didn't welcome the attention . . . Kaufman visited an impressive roster of archives to uncover new details."--The Wall Street Journal

"Illuminating . . . It is surely not the end of the story."--The Economist

About the Author

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose long list of bylines includes The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News. His wide ranging work has covered topics such as labor, local activism, racism and job discrimination, and corporate tax dodging, and has also been recognized with the Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award, and the Columbia University School of Journalism, among others. He is the author of The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China; A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.