Homeland
The War on Terror in American Life
Published on 11. March 2025
Book
Hardback
592 pages
978-1-83674-072-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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 / Votes
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 * 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. -- Ed Burmila * New Republic * 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 -- Pankaj Mishra, author of <i>Run and Hide</i> 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. -- Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of <i>Palo Alto</i> 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 -- Andrew Bacewich, author of <i>America's War for the Greater Middle East</i> 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. -- Bilal Qureshi * Washington Post * A rich and memorable new history. -- David Wallace-Wells * New York Times * Shows how the War on Terror seeped into American culture. -- James Robins * Times Literary Supplement * An indispensable account of how we got to the terrible place we are in. -- Jackson Lears * London Review of Books *
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 50 mm
Weight
764 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-83674-072-8 (9781836740728)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2025
Verso Books
€31.99
Available for download
Person
Richard Beck is an editor at n+1 magazine. He is the author of We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s and lives in Brooklyn, New York.