Hardback
Forthcoming
Homeland:The War on Terror in American Life
A groundbreaking history of how the ‘war on terror’ changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the nature of citizenship to the cars Americans bought and the TV they watched
For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought abroad so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, altering people’s sense of themselves, their neighbours, and the strangers they sat next to on aeroplanes.
In a fascinating and exhaustive account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of the transformation of American life wrought by the war. He describes sports stadiums fortified to look like military bases. The surging sales of guns, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The racism and xeno-phobia, the erosion of free speech, and the normalisation of mass surveillance. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time understanding themselves as patriots. The war fuelled an impunity culture, he argues, that came to a head with Trump’s rise to power. To see America through the lens of Homeland is to understand the country like never before.
Reviews
Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. It’s impossible not to admire the nerve and scope of Beck’s treatise
We are living in a golden age of Big Books, with doorstop-size nonfiction that is as captivating as it is meticulous. Homeland throws its hat into this ring and holds its own among the very best recent examples of the genre.
Describes, with a beguiling mix of intellectual precision and passion, and from a novel perspective, the sinister mutations in American life induced by the war on terror. Everyone interested in the fate of democracy,
or simply how violence abroad comes home, should read it
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An immersive plunge into the icy tub of twenty-first-century American history as we’ve lived it so far. Beck puts the reader so deep in the action that you can hear the “U-S-A!” chants. Chilling.
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On 9/11, the United States lost its mind, succumbing to a protracted bout of hubris, ineptitude, and heedless violence. Today, Americans are inclined to expunge from memory the disasters that ensued. Richard Beck refuses to forget. In this eloquent and insightful account, he tallies up the perverse consequences of our own folly. An extraordinary achievement
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In 500 ambitious pages of pop culture, urban design, automotive trends, surveillance metadata and Batman, Beck constructs a sprawling portrait of why 9/11 is still at the heart of American life. Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. It’s impossible not to admire the nerve and scope of Beck’s treatise.
, Washington Post -
A rich and memorable new history.
, New York Times