The Undertow

Scenes from a Slow Civil War

By: Jeff Sharlet

Narrated by: Jeff Sharlet

Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

An instant New York Times best seller.

One of America’s finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart.

An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.

Across the country, men “of God” glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war—a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. At a conference for incels, lonely single men come together to rage against women. On the far right, everything is heightened—love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage. Here, in the undertow, our 45th president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of White womanhood.

Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.

Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Jeff Sharlet (P)2023 Audible, Inc.

Brave, Informed, Essential

A brave, informed, essential journey through America’s fractured psyche in the Trumpocene Era. Every good citizen should read this book.

Brilliant!

The author’s journalistic style is immersive and his writing is visceral. I truly felt that sense of the culture and nuance of the MAGA base. Through his travels and interactions with true believers, the author effectively showed the ‘condition’ afflicting our country. His writing and voice had me feeling the undertow.

Correction: hang loose, not shocker

It is hilarious that this over-read egg head would bring in so much rich context and make a simple mistake of repeatedly saying the "shocker" hand gesture when I believe he means the hang-loose gesture.

In defense of Ashli Babbet, the gesture with the thumb and pinky is hang-loose. The shocker is like a scouts salute with an added pinky. The latter being a life sexual joke popular with adolescent boys that W was once tricked into flashing without knowing it's significance.

Truth Hurts

A literary travelogue that weaves together tales of frightened, credulous Americans (all armed to the teeth) and the false prophets who manipulate them for profit or power. This has little to do with Trump—he’s an irritant, or perhaps another symptom. The Undertow is about how individual grief and fear become delusion and anger, and how quickly personal delusion and anger give way to mass psychosis in the Information Age.

Sharlet has a sharp-eye and dry delivery that (as has been noted previously) is very reminiscent of Joan Didion. The opening and closing chapters are barely related, but I was grateful for the buffer—what’s between is seriously fucking distressing.

Great opening and close

The opening chapter, focused on the life and activism of Harry Belafonte, is alone worth the price of admission.
The core story, following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt, is fascinating, but wanders and meanders at times. But even then, it’s insightful, especially for those of us who struggle to understand how folks can believe obvious conspiracy theories.

Yes, but…

Overall, I enjoyed the book, if it’s possible to enjoy such scary moments and if one considers such wildly-connected disparate events and recollections to be a contiguous story. It sounded like a series of magazine articles strung together loosely connected by his travels across the country, and indeed, I found several chapters either reprinted or just duplicated from various journals. I do understand that the telling of such counter-rational conspiracy tales may help to understand what democracy and Western values are up against, and I was duly frightened and forewarned.

A scary look at the rough edges of America

A thread through this chronicle is actually the proliferation of disinformation and intolerance in America now. It hurts the heart in so many ways and doesn’t seem recognizable as our country. Must read.

The Undertow is an exceptional, necessary book in our understanding of the current state of our society.

I was riveted by every interaction that Jeff Sharlet described and researched in this book. His ability to respectfully tell the viewpoints of the people he spoke with while helping the listener understand the “reasons” behind their ideas is an essential tool for countering the dangerous and hateful narratives that are being spread across our communities.

Poetry

This is a book about stupid trump supporters and weird religious extremists, stretching across the land from California, to Wisconsin, to New York. But that’s just a cover for the author to talk about what he’s really interested in, which are subjects like philosophy, words, our shared humanity, and what we are and where we connect and disconnect from one another and this world.

It is about bizarre gun nuts in Eau Claire and the undercurrent of the joy of positive thinking in an ex president’s stance, but more about thinking about random coincidences and life and love and what it all means. The author is never satisfied to 2D his subjects, but rather would give them all the beauty and grandeur and disgustingly true comments that they actually made that they are worthy of. Humans deserve nothing less than being treated as wonderfully and wickedly as they are as they move through the world.

Sharlet sees people, but discontent with that miraculous skill, he moves on to the wind, the wonders, and the absolute scary bull of modern life and modern love. The people he interviews are scary freaks, but they’re also the same people you interacted with peaceably today and will be in line behind tomorrow. This is us baby.

No accompanying PDF

I mostly enjoyed (although was frequently dismayed by) this exploration of some of the right-wing culture currently infecting the USA. Not sure I really "got" the point of the bookend chapters involving Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays but the middle was quite interesting.

However, the introduction states that a PDF is available an accompaniment to the title and the narrator/author mentions an accompanying PDF multiple times. Such a PDF is not included and when I contacted Audible customer support about this, they demanded time stamps of where the narrator mentions this and then basically asked if I knew how to open a pdf. Um...yeah. There is no pdf accompanying this.