He has, that is, yielded to a much more subtle temptation, the sort that exerts a special pull on the morally and intellectually serious: the urge to write a Book of Everything, a book about the world, about America, about the author himself.

Now Rhodes has written a more ambitious and less conventional book that seeks to combine the firsthand experience of the foreign correspondent, the special access of the intimate to power, personal memoir and armchair speculation. First, he wrote a memoir, “The World as It Is,” animated by a vivid portrait of a president at once visionary and cautionary, a reformer with a tragic awareness of the limits imposed by refractory human nature. If you have spent eight years as the chief speechwriter and confidant of the president of the United States, as Ben Rhodes did for Barack Obama, when you leave you can take your pick of gaudy opportunities - television pundit, investment banker, global consultant.

At the same time, he learns from a diverse set of characters - from Obama to rebels to a rising generation of leaders - how looking squarely at where America has gone wrong only makes it more essential to fight for what America is supposed to be at home - for our own country, and the entire world.Being American in the World We’ve Made By Ben Rhodes Throughout, Rhodes comes to realize how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape: through the excesses of our post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, mania for technology and social media, and the racism that shaped the backlash to the Obama presidency. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spends time with is poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, and America itself reaches the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance.Įqual parts memoir and reporting, After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. Over the next three years, he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward.

In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? A former White House aide and close confidante to President Barack Obama-and New York Times bestselling author of The World as It Is-travels the globe in a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers.

After the fall rhodes