Writers Peter and Evan Osnos Comes to Chestertown

On May 7, the Bookplate bookstore and Retriever Bar will continue their Authors & Oysters series of author events as they host father and son journalists Peter and Evan Osnos.
For almost 20 years, Peter Osnos wrote for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, joined Random House in 1984 as a senior editor, and founded PublicAffairs where he has edited or published countless authors from President Jimmy Carter to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He is the editor of a recently released book of biographical essays: George Soros: A Life in Full.
Son Evan Osnos is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and National Book Award Winner for his 2014 Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China based on his eight years in China. His Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury is a mirror held up to a fractured American landscape, a country that has become more unrecognizable the two decades bracketed by 9/11 and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capital.
The Spy recently talked with Evan about Wildland and the craft of journalism reflected in his investigation into what happened to America in the last twenty years-by approaching it the way he observed China, as a foreign correspondent.
Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury offers an extraordinary gallery of individuals existing in the vacuum of their own American experience in Greenwich, Connecticut, Chicago, Illinois, and Clarksburg West Virginia, along with the legal and policy changes that have led to what sometimes feels like an intractable quagmire of polarized factions. But there is hope, Osnos says, and he’ll be talking about it with his father at the Retriever Bar on May 7.
The conversation starts with a reference to former Chestertown resident Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer Prize author of What It Takes, and the effort good journalism requires to accurately portray their subjects.