THE YEAR THAT BROKE AMERICA

Chronicling a chaotic year in American life (not 2020).

Journalist Rice, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, draws on a mixture of reportage, archival sources, interviews, and legal testimony to create a heady portrait of the year 2000, which he claims marked a shattering turning point for the nation. Wildly digressive and overlong, the narrative veers from politics to business, immigration to terrorism, Florida to Kandahar. He begins in late 1999, when Ziad Jarrah left Germany to engage in terrorist training. His life would end on Sept. 11, 2001, in an attack orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. It was a year when the nation’s cultural elite were presided over by a cast of men whose fortunes would fall precipitously in the decades that followed: film mogul Harvey Weinstein, TV executives Les Moonves and Roger Ailes, Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly, and Matt Lauer. On the political scene, Al Gore struggled to separate himself from the huge personality of Bill Clinton, while George W. Bush honed his identity as an “easygoing centrist” and “compassionate conservative.” The election in which the Supreme Court decided for Bush was the first since 1888 in which a candidate who won the popular vote still lost. On the immigrant front, the family battle over custody of Elián Gonzalez played out on TV, a spectacle that cultural critic Frank Rich called a “relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism.” Reality TV, not limited to real-life events, was shaped into a new genre of entertainment with CBS’s hugely popular Survivor. Among the dramatis personae in Rice’s well-populated history are Janet Reno, Clinton’s attorney general; David Boies, Gore’s lawyer; financier Kevin Ingram, involved in the “gangland culture” of Deutsche Bank; real estate tycoon Donald Trump, ruminating on the idea of running for office, and his then-girlfriend Melania Knauss; and activist Jesse Jackson.

Though Rice doesn’t mount a fully convincing argument for the year’s significance, he tells a lively story.