Powertown

by Michael Lind

Only a few blocks beyond the brilliant marble monuments, only a few steps behind the most powerful of Washington's elite, a whole, nearly hidden world exists - a world where high-profile fixers reign supreme while low-level bureaucrats jockey for Beltway "McJobs" and the city's impoverished slide further into squalor.

Powertown follows a range of characters separated by endless differences and yet connected by the most spidery of threads - a lobbyist, a programmer for NPR, a journalist, a drug czar's flunky, a private security guard, a Salvadoran maid, and a teenage gangsta - as they are borne along a shifting and potentially calamitous current until their destinies converge in a shocking flare-up of violence.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Currently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.