In Conversation: On An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a CNN contributor, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq, and was the China correspondent at The New Yorker (2008-2013). His first book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now. After a decade abroad, often championing America’s foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, and the right of equal opportunity for all, Osnos returned to find that each of these principles was under assault. Reported over six years, following ordinary individuals in three places Osnos knows firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) illuminates the origins of the anger. Kirkus praised Osnos’ “stellar reporting ... As an overview of a fractious ideological landscape, this skillful treatment is hard to beat. An elegant survey of the causes and effects of polarization in America.”

Peter L.W. Osnos, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and raised in New York, worked as an assistant to the journalist I.F. Stone and joined The Washington Post in 1966. He served as a correspondent in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and London, and also as the publication's national and foreign editor. He later joined Random House as a senior editor and was associate publisher and publisher of the Times Books imprint. He founded PublicAffairs in partnership with the Perseus Books Group and served as publisher and editor at large until 2020. He is also the founder of the Caravan Project on the development of digital and audio publishing. An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (Platform Books LLC) is the first book released by its publisher, an endeavor Osnos launched with his wife, Susan Sherer Osnos, in 2020. In his memoir, Osnos takes a look back at five decades as a witness to momentous events and thought-provoking interviews with some of the most influential personalities of our time. He covered war in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Soviet Union at the height of Kremlin power, London's swinging 1960s, and Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s. Osnos has also edited books by presidents, billionaires, basketball superstars, spies, political dissidents, and the writers Molly Ivins and Peggy Noonan, among many others.