Examines America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11 and the global environmental crisis, and shows how the solutions to these two problems are linked-- we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.

Bill O'Reilly calls the famous and powerful to account, and dares to get personal, questioning just how much our closest friends, families, and lovers do look out for us. He delivers a powerful message about personal responsibility and self-reliance in an uncertain world, forcing us to ask just how much genuine altruism is left in a society that thrives on self-indulgence and ruthless competition.

Through an examination of the lives of several Americans and leading public figures over the past three decades, Packer portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

"It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal--that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding--reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social...

"A sweeping 50-year history of how the Baby Boomers took the reforms of the 1960s too far, leading to a multitude of contradictions in American society and values that caused our current political polarization"-- Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly highin wealth, freedom, and social stabilityand...

"As a boy, Robert Kaplan recalls his father driving trucks across the country to earn a living for his family, a man who witnessed and understood America from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline--increasingly cosmopolitan cities...

The author, known for his landmark work in American journalism and for his other books, The Greatest Generation, and Boom!, now turns his attention to the challenges that face America in the new millennium, to offer reflections on how we can restore America's greatness. "What happened to the America I thought I knew?" he writes. "Have we simply wandered off course, but only temporarily? Or have we allowed ourselves to be so divided that we are easy...