The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts

by Janet Reitman

A stunning work of narrative nonfiction that traces the lives of nine Americans over three decades, offering a vivid account of a nation in crisis—from award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Janet Reitman

A thrill-seeking former Navy pilot chases adventure in Afghanistan, while in suburbia, his teenage son spirals into extremism. The grandson of African freedom fighters joins the FBI to save America from terrorism and ends up terrorizing the African immigrants he’d sworn to protect. A young Marine who sees himself as a true-blue American goes to war in Iraq, comes home broken, and is reborn as white nationalist. An idealistic young attorney defends a Palestinian engineer she believes is wrongly accused of funding Hamas. These four people, and five others, struggle to find their way in a country reimagining itself in the wake of 9/11.

In The Inheritance, Janet Reitman, the bestselling author of Inside Scientology, delivers an intimate and urgent account of American disillusionment—and a paean to hope. From the bucolic suburbs of Boston to the immigrant enclaves of Dallas, from the deserts of Iraq to the encrypted chatrooms that fuel hatred and extremism, The Inheritance unfolds in repeating narratives of people moving through the decades, from the end of the Reagan era to the present day, painting a sweeping and deeply affective portrait of how a country revered for its democratic ideals became a nation defined by its fears.

Rigorously reported and brimming with novelistic detail, The Inheritance reveals the hidden cost of the war on terror, exposing the psychic wounds that haunt us to this day.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Terrorism, American

424 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 6, 2026

About the author

Janet Reitman is an award-winning journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, she has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and was a fellow at the New America Foundation. Reitman’s previous book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book.

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up.

Title and author: The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts by Janet Reitman
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: October 6, 2026
For those who: had their brain chemistry changed by 2018-era Contrapoints, enjoy the Weird Little Guys Podcast, seem unable to shake off the sense of terror and rage and suspicion and anger bubbling under the surface of everything, americans who have been seriously considering fleeing the country for the last few years

Thank you very much to the publisher, who provided this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

I struggle to even know where to begin. This is undoubtably going to top my favorite nonfiction of 2026 list and we still have a quarter of the year to go. The Inheritance is a view into the post-9/11 demoralization of America & the drift into violent right-wing extremism that was simmering long before Trump ever stepped into office.

The basics are these: Janet Reitman is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in many major publications & who is probably most well-known for her 2011 book on Scientology and her reporting on white nationalists and American national security. She brings all of that experience and knowledge to bear here, as The Inheritance, traces the stories of various people caught in the riptide of the post-9/11 surveillance state.

The subtitle "a tragedy in five acts" is apt. These people - a lawyer defending people accused of providing material support to terrorists, a PTSD-riddled vet who founds a white nationalist group, the parents blind to their child's neo-nazi radicalization - form a tragic Greek chorus. In turn, each one steps to center stage and the reader is forced to look directly into the face of their pain. Meanwhile, the chorus wails and gnashes teeth and speaks in unison: "this is what we have wrought. this is what you have wrought."

I ended up knowing quite a few of these characters from having done my own reading into the nasty world of the alt-right, which just heightened the dramatic irony. Everyone at the ancient theatron knew things that Oedipus didn't, and as the play slowly wended towards its horrible conclusion, the horror was all the more heightened because they knew what was coming. Knowing the fate of Andrew Oneschuk before he was even introduced to the narrative sent chills up my spine. And just so on the big picture - we are living in a time where we can look back on the past with dramatic, sophoclean, tragic irony. We know where we are now in 2026, and we're doomed to watch Reitman unspool the plot nonetheless.

This book clearly inhabits the world of narrative nonfiction, which is a genre that can be at its worst pretentious and inadequately researched, and at its best more than a little navel-gazing. But The Inheritance reaches a rare strata of that hypersaturated little corner because it not only reads well on a sentence-to-sentence level, but actually appears to combine meticulous research with meaning, reflection, and thematic depth.

I left this book with just as much dread as I had felt in the first few pages. It's hard to be an average person alive right now without carrying that weight with you. And Reitman pulls no punches; this is not a panacea, it's an indictment. Having an inheritance implies getting something that one is owed, whether because it is earned, deserved, or given by fate. And by all accounts, America deserves its present moment.

(edited for grammar on 10/21. don’t @ me)

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Janet Reitman’s The Inheritance is an engaging, VICE-style post-mortem on the American dream. It's an incisive but bleak piece of nonfiction, albeit one that can’t quite accept its own premise—that reality is the sum of competing fictions.

In Reitman’s telling, the United States is a boil waiting to be lanced. We follow Terry Albury, a Black FBI agent who struggles to reconcile the Islamophobia of his work with his own experience of racism. We read about the Oneschuks, a military family with a neo-nazi son and aspiring Navy seal daughter. We walk alongside Marlo Cadeddu, a criminal defense lawyer for a Palestinian man accused of collaborating with Hamas. We watch Nathan Damigo ascend the ranks of the alt-right before being unceremoniously discarded. As each person reckons with the unmaking of American mythology, we see how they begin to form their own.

The author does an excellent job of showing how collective angst pulls people in different directions. One person’s disenfranchisement fosters white power radicalization, whereas another’s leads to a desire to join ISIS, while a third person is driven to defend those who are profiled by the government. There’s never any doubt that complex motivations have complex consequences, and Reitman’s empathy is remarkable. Readers will quickly get a sense that The Inheritance is a labor of love as much as scholarly interest.

And yet, because this book is built around interviews with its subjects, that subjectivity begins to coalesce into a self-righteous tone with nowhere to go. The book demands a meta-narrative, and I personally found it to be incongruous with its subject matter; Reitman needs it to be a Greek tragedy, even when the banality of its truth would be more effective.

For example, Albury was famously arrested for leaking FBI documents, and there’s a genuine grief to him being a whistleblower for people who won’t listen, but for that story to land, Reitman depicts the FBI as petty in its cruelty and absurd in its incompetence. A similar turn happens in Cadeddu’s story when an acquaintance venomously asks how she sleeps at night defending “criminals”—our characters exist against a backdrop of caricatures. Regardless of whether those depictions are accurate, they read like the author is trying to build a unified conclusion that just doesn’t exist.

Extremism is scary because it’s ordinary. It’s one of many tools for making sense of the world’s chaos, and while the subjects of The Inheritance largely reach that conclusion, Reitman seems to resist it. The story is too relentlessly bleak for nuance, but don’t readers deserve more than history as entropy? Perhaps it’s unfair to ask for some optimism in a self-labeled tragedy, but I think that’s part of our American inheritance too.

And I write that as a very pessimistic person! It’s just that the American tragedy isn’t merely the ubiquity of people like Richard Spencer, but rather that they still have such a huge platform when there are people like Zohran Mamdani presenting a kind, aspirational politic. People regularly see better choices and still choose cruelty.

It seems like Reitman determined the ending of The Inheritance, and, by extension, the US, long before she ever started the book, and that sort of fatalism merely exchanges one American mythology for another—nihilism.

Thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the ARC!

[Cole Norum · Rating 5 out of 5]

A staggering, breathtaking work of narrative non-fiction. This tells the uniquely damaged and confoundingly inartful ways America has navigated the decades post-9/11. Reitman accomplishes this by tracing and unearthing a handful of remarkable, harrowing and totally American stories as they traverse a landscape of far-right internet hate, overzealous and (insidiously) under-baked approaches to policing domestic terror and deeply complicated family dynamics informed by religion and politics. There is a word in the blurb on my copy’s cover that sums this up perfectly: “symphonic”.

[Emboldened · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the advanced reader's copy.

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking read. The Inheritance examines the long shadow of America’s post-9/11 wars including the choices made by military and civilian leaders, but also the consequences those wars left for service members, institutions, and the wider public. The book draws on extensive interviews and research to explore how two decades of conflict shaped the ways the United States plans, wages, and thinks about war. What I appreciated most was the range of perspectives found in this book-showing how everyday experiences can influence a culture or timeline. Rather than presenting one simple explanation for the problems that emerged after 9/11, the book shows how different decisions, systems, and people contributed to the larger issue. I learned a great deal from this book, and it gave me more context for looking at post-9/11 America with a more critical and informed lens. It is detailed, but the subject matter makes that detail feel necessary. It is detailed but easy to read. This is the kind of nonfiction that stays with you because it does not just recount history, it asks readers to consider what the country inherited from these wars and what that legacy means going forward.

[Joshua Hammer · Rating 4.75 out of 5]

Reitman presents a master class in narrative journalism in this immersive account of half a dozen characters swept up in the alienation, division, and paranoia of post 9/11 America. Reminiscent of, and partly inspired by, George Packer's The Unwinding, Reitman's book shows how the ripple effects of the Al Qaeda attack-- from the misbegotten war in Iraq to the targeting by law enforcement of American Muslims -- upended the lives of ordinary US citizens. Her portraits of a heroic attorney defending unjustly accused Palestinian-Americans, an African-American FBI agent tormented by the abuses he observes inside his institution, and an Iraqi war veteran and drawn into crime and white nationalism -- are indelible. This was a story waiting to be told, and there's no better story teller out there than Janet Reitman.

[Tonya Bryant Gillon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a long book about all the destruction people have done. Some in the name of God and others just seemed to be fighting back at the government. It seemed highly researched and well laid out. This book was very informative.

I’m not sure how I feel about out the book. I feel angry at the topic not at the book. The Inheritance was a good read though, it just flowed.

I want to thank NetGalley and Random House for this advanced reader copy and this is my honest review.

[Lissa00 · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

This book examines the unraveling of the country since 9/11 by following a handful of diverse Americans. This is meticulously researched and a detailed portrait of 21st century America, but it is definitely not a hopeful book. I received an early digital copy through NetGalley.

[Cindy Neighbors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tragic, informative and well-written. Everyone should read this book. Thank you to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the Advanced Copy.

[Will Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like the great post-9/11 novel we've all been waiting for. It's a sad story, beautifully told, about how perhaps the greatest casualty of 9/11 was our trust in each other and the country.