American Canto
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American Canto
Narrated by:
Olivia Nuzzi
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Olivia Nuzzi
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By:
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Olivia Nuzzi
About this listen
Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014, when the political landscape began to reconfigure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next ten years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation and propelled her to the heights of her profession.
Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Nuzzi went quiet, drove west, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she—and we—have experienced over the last decade.
Nuzzi walked through hell and she took notes. The result is a brilliant and bracing reckoning with recent history from one of our sharpest political observers. Beginning in the present in California, and then turning her gaze back east and back in time, she crafts a dazzling mosaic of the Trump era: her many behind-the-scenes encounters with Trump himself, from their first meeting in Trump Tower to a wealth of revelatory conversations about his Hollywood aspirations, his dreams, his fears about being assassinated, and more; the life she led uneasily that skidded to a halt; the rise of digital surveillance and the decline of privacy; the normalization of political violence; and the collision of polarization with the democratization of information to sow doubt about every aspect of our reality.
American Canto is also a powerful personal history. Nuzzi’s account of growing up in working-class New Jersey as the child of alcoholics in the shadow of New York City and 9/11 is raw and moving. Her mother was angry, beautiful, and unpredictable. Her father, a loving man who supported his family as a sanitation worker, removed debris from Ground Zero. They both died young. A version of Nuzzi did, too. She approached this “kind of death” with the critical distance of a reporter. When interrogating her own mistakes, Nuzzi confesses, “I had trained my whole life in the battlefield of crisis.”
Despite her profession, Olivia Nuzzi has never been interested in breaking news. American Canto is not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president. Instead, it is something more artful and more interesting—a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time. It seeks to reframe our understanding of the history we are living through from the perspective of someone who observed it from within the kaleidoscope and now sees it clearly from the other side.
Editorial Review
Blond ambition
Let me guess—either you’ve seen
American Canto all over your feeds, or the term “Nuzzigate” doesn’t even ring a bell. Would that I were in the latter camp, but alas! In media circles, Olivia Nuzzi is infamous for imploding her career as a star reporter by becoming romantically entangled with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose presidential bid she had been covering for
New York magazine. A year and change later, she’s back with this book (the release was pushed out to more discreetly follow that of RFK Jr.’s wife, Cheryl Hines), and I’d be lying if I said my rubbernecking wasn’t at least partly rewarded. Laced with gossip, albeit mostly anonymized, and memorable prose, the book is rather fascinating, despite the fact that Nuzzi says she wrote most of it on her phone while hiking. She reads it in her own voice (which is so soft-spoken that President Trump has remarked on it), and with commentary on everything from the rise of MAGA to the ritualistic sacrifice of blondes in American culture, it’s strangely compelling—in an IYKYK sort of way, of course.—Kat J., Audible Editor
Insipid and banal
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