New York Magazine’s Andrew Rice makes a compelling case that 2000 was awful
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
‘The Year That Broke America,’ according to author Andrew Rice, isn’t the much maligned 2020. It’s the year 2000.
In his extensive recounting of the first year of the millennium (and some of the years that preceded it), Rice details the trials and tribulations regarding the big stories of the year: the media circus surrounding then six-year old Cuban immigrant Elián González, the political circus surrounding George Bush, Al Gore and that year’s presidential election, and of course, whatever the reader wants to characterize the circus around Donald Trump as.
Rice also covers lesser known events, such as the saga surrounding Kevin Ingram, a Wall Street executive that made some extraordinarily bad calls, the big city trials and tribulations of United States Attorney General Janet Reno and the indoctrination of Ziad Jarrah, one of the terrorists that flew a plane into the World Trade Center.
The large cast of characters, all real people, are apart of a bunch of big stories that took place throughout the year, and Rice subtly connects all of them together to explain everything that happened at the end of 2000, the events that led up to them, how that all had implications for every single year that followed it, and how some of it continues to affect us today.
Rice paints a rather large, sometimes overwhelming picture of chaos and the cast of characters that participated in it. But in the end, everything ties together to make “The Year That Broke America” quite the masterpiece that will interest any student of history.
