Americans lived in a different reality in 1980: Vermont was the only state that let residents carry a concealed firearm without a permit. Twenty-four states now allow this-and numerous other gun laws have fallen by the wayside. When police were accused of wrongdoing, the default answer from society's arbiters was: 'The police wouldn't lie.' Editors steered clear of stories about rape and sexual violence. The word 'homeless' wasn't in common use. The fabric of the middle class had not yet begun fraying.
America of the 2020s is living with cultural shapeshifting rooted in the 1980s. American Doom Loop chronicles the first part of that moving picture, then brings the story forward.
As a newspaper journalist, Dale Maharidge had a front-row seat to this decade. He was in the Philippines during the last days of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, witnessing the US lose a critical piece of its empire dating to the Spanish-American War; he embedded with a group that was a precursor to the Oath Keepers; and he investigated police, who kept trying to get him fired.
Through it all, Maharidge gained an invaluable view of a complicated decade that offers insight into our society today.
Zoë Vanderlip is missing. The Ark is empty. And nobody on McGee Ridge can agree about what exactly happened to her.
McGee Ridge, earthquake-rattled and clinging to the thousand-foot cliffs of the Northern California coast, is nestled in one of a very few truly wild places left in the Lower 48. It is also home to a band of off-grid outlaws who vanished behind the famed Redwood Curtain in the 1960s and whose time there is swiftly coming to an end.
Will Specter, a burned-out journalist for the Los Angeles Times, arrived here to build a wilderness cabin for himself in the ’90s, after spending a decade as a war correspondent. In a community that subsists mainly off illegal cannabis farming, Will is an outlier. So too is Zoë Vanderlip, the revered matriarch of the original 60s settlers, whose adult son Klaus is one of the largest growers in the region. Unlike nearly everyone else, neither Will nor Zoë has ever grown marijuana, but when Zoë suddenly goes missing from her home―a large hand-built structure known as the Ark―the industry’s competing forces can no longer be ignored.
Pairing up with Daniel Likowski, a principled but mysterious grower whose business has been crushed by legalization, Will finds himself swept into a world of lost idealism and desperate loners, mobsters and corporate shell companies, violence and hypocrisy, all operating beneath the canopy of an ancient forest teetering at the very edge of the continent.
Spurned on both by his journalistic zeal and a strange love for the place and its people, Will begins his investigation as a journey to understand not just what happened to Zoë but to all of them.
In this atmospheric rural noir, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge’s debut novel plunges readers into a country that has existed for decades beyond the bounds of America-at-large but nevertheless reflects the essential conflicts of our divided culture.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class, and his new book explores the limits of the American Dream in the 2020s. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth. Motivated by this haunting phrase—“Fucked at Birth”—Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism, and featuring photos from across the US, Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge’s journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of “upward mobility,” while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City, Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally—after decades of refusal—recalibrate what we are going to do about it.
One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box-materials proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people-and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating story on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance.
Sgt. Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign he'd served in it was a single black and white photograph of himself and another soldier tacked to the wall of his basement workshop.
After Steve Maharidge's death, his son Dale, now an adult, began a twelve-year quest to understand his father's preoccupation with the photo. What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why had his father remained silent about his experiences and the man in the picture, Herman Mulligan? In his search for answers, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.
In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, with lessons for the children whose parents are returning from war today.
