Beautiful Country Burn Again is a whirling journey centered on a knotty, academic equation that Fountain believes is both the cause of America’s tensions and the impetus for constant reinvention ... [Fountain] brandishes a full array of literary tools, including song, verse, historical anecdotes, piles of research and plenty of satisfying takedowns to keep you on his ride ... Many will be tempted to dismiss Beautiful Country as another angry critique of Trump. They would be remiss ... No one gets out of his book unscathed ... Those who savor such viciousness will be delighted. His brutal observations could easily be the main feature of his work, yet Fountain has more important things to say and more ingenious ways to say them.

Fountain brings a unique and thoughtful assessment to the subject matter. With fluid, captivating writing and hilarious quotes and descriptions, he details each candidate’s foibles, blithely ticking off each month of the campaign ... Fountain begins each chapter with a Book of Days section, a collection of political and cultural notes on events and statements that captured the zeitgeist of that month. At first I thought it was just too eclectic, but as the months rolled on, I sensed an underlying message. That message holds the many moving parts of 2016’s politics together ... It’s not a new message; many other writers have offered similar versions. But not only is Fountain more entertaining, he more clearly illustrates how a cultural undercurrent of divisive economic interests, which has caused this nation to go up in flames in the past, is once again driving a populist surge against the status quo.

[Fountain's] eye for the absurd and ability to draw attention to the sheer strangeness of America made him a perfect observer of 2016: when politics met reality TV ... Two years on, in the whirling chaos of the Trumpian news cycle, [Fountain's] election-year commentaries could have seemed faded, almost quaint mementos. But in book form, expanded, they live up to his own description: they are both a diagnosis of America’s symptoms of stress and a record of developing crisis ... Funny and also horrifying, Fountain has spectacular historical reach.

A meandering, shaggy monster of a book, it’s too long (skip the interchapter month-by-month summaries of the news events of 2016), and its first half—brilliant reporting from the campaign trail—feels only loosely joined to the second, a pained cry from the heart about the many decades of history that have led to the pickle we’re in. But in different ways both halves are dazzling. The novelist’s gifts that so inspired Billy Lynn are on full display ... What are such bait-and-switch con men [like Trump] offering? Above all, messages, once overt, then coded, today starkly overt again, about race. Fountain has a lot to say about this ... Fountain...gives the most extensive and deeply felt account of how politicians have so long blown on the coals of that fury ... One of the strengths of Beautiful Country Burn Again is that it spares nothing in showing how the Democrats, too, making use of hints and code words, have danced with that devil [of racism] ... The most glowing pages in Beautiful Country Burn Again are about what FDR tried to do with the New Deal ... He gives a particularly searing portrait of life on the vast majority of American farms in the early 1930s ... imagine if a Trump-like figure had been president during the crisis of the Depression.

[In]Beautiful Country Burn Again, Mr. Fountain’s series of rambling, denunciatory essays on the 2016 presidential campaign... Every assertion, every observation, is aflame with indignation ... [Fountain's] thesis that America requires dramatic ethical recalibration presupposes that we live in a madhouse of rank racism. If that’s true, it ought to be easy to prove with a few judicious quotes. For Mr. Fountain, though, it’s rarely about what people say but about what they’re really saying ... Yet in Mr. Fountain’s worldview a deleterious trend or culpable remark can only ever be the result of the foulest bigotry, and the public figures of whom he disapproves are by definition monsters. There is no room here for argument or nuance—only loathing and the hope of imminent fire.

With its digressions into American history, culture, biography, and political theory, and with its tonal shifts from blazing moral argument to understated, hilarious observation, the book defies categorization as mere journalism ... [Fountain's] writing delights in its own seamless passages between high and low and sweeps us up in its pleasure as it does so ... In the latter part of the book, there are some sections in which Fountain’s commitment to surprise and play seems to have been overwhelmed by the seriousness of the predicament he describes ... That said, there’s no one I would rather read on Where We Are Now. I learn from Fountain’s vast and coherent research even as I take pride in the amazing liberties he takes with his form.

[Fountain] hates vividly, with the verbal energy of a prizewinning novelist. But he also analyzes this history with considerable care. He has done the reading, as the book’s footnotes attest. He is as good on our politics as Norman Mailer was in the 1970s, and he is as indifferent to evenhandedness as Mailer was, too. Some of his history is flawed, and much of his language ignores the rules of the road observed by more conventional political reporters. It is fun to read ... The novelist’s talents that won him the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk are on display on nearly every page. Fountain’s writing can be emotionally provocative.

On the campaign trail with Fountain, you don’t feel, as you do with [George] Saunders, that you’ve been delivered to a parallel America, one even more paranoid and violent than the one you know from television, or, as with David Foster Wallace on the bus with John McCain in 2000, to a David Lynch movie version of politics. Going on the road tends to send Fountain’s mind spinning back into the past ... The question, however, is whether we really are undergoing a revolution on the scale of the Civil War or the Depression and its aftermath ... These are the twin notes of Fountain’s book: an openhearted patriotic spirit of fellowship with his countrymen and a mounting sense of distress that Americans have always been but are now especially vulnerable to fraudulent appeals to their ugliest instincts. Most of his excursions on the road and through the past yield a tableau mixing the venal and the humane. But understanding requires an index of national villains ... Sketching the history of racial politics since World War II and the GOP’s Southern Strategy, Fountain paints Trump as the second coming of Barry Goldwater ... The strongest and most damning section of Beautiful Country Burn Again is the part that’s been most heavily revised in the election’s aftermath: a history of Hillary Clinton’s career ... painting her as the tool of 'a morally bankrupt system that she’d played a large and active role in creating ... Nihilism’s a blast for people who’ve been lied to all their lives.'

[Fountain's] words are emotional and powerful. While Donald Trump and those who enable him are primary targets, no one escapes his criticism, including much of the American electorate. Beautiful Country Burn Again has the potential to arm the body politic with their greatest weapon--knowledge.

Pithy and profound, Fountain’s political observations fly off the page in a torrent of mantra-worthy quotes, while his historical analyses stun with their depth of research and relevance ... Fountain’s mix of salient lessons from the past and essential guideposts for the future is a must-have addition to the 'how did we get here' canon of political scrutiny in and of the age of Trump.

Fountain’s vivid prose shows the novelist’s knack for revealing character through gesture and physicality and offers a shrewd analysis of how Trump’s supporters felt liberated by his assaults on political correctness. Whip-smart and searching in its indictment of cant and falsity, this is perhaps the best portrait yet of an astounding election.

As the author covers events much like an especially woke journalist, he slides gradually into his Third Reinvention thesis by showing the mutation of traditional presidential campaigning, grounded in a Frankenstein-like scenario during which a monster—especially Trump but also Sanders—turns against its inventor, represented by traditional political parties ... For most readers, Fountain will offer fresh insights. While some readers may not agree with all of his conclusions, the author’s masterful original phrasings make the book worthwhile, urgent, and timely.