Anyone who is not a Donald Trump devotee knows that our country is in trouble—and that the current administration is largely responsible for the illiberal atmosphere that is poisoning our democracy.

While countless books have attempted to diagnose the malady, few have been able to offer the range of viewpoints featured in The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. How We Recover (Simon and Schuster, Sept. 15) by the writers of the Atlantic. Other than the New Yorker, I can’t think of a magazine that is more incisive about political and social issues than the Atlantic, and this collection includes a who’s-who list of contributors: among them, Ibram X. Kendi, Anne Applebaum, Drew Gilpin Faust, Ed Yong, Franklin Foer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Molly Ball, George Packer, James Fallows, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Mark Bowden.

In a starred review, our critic calls it “an illuminating collection of perceptive, well-argued, and compelling essays.” Edited by the magazine’s editor at large, Cullen Murphy, the book features an introduction by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who takes Trump to task for his deceit, laziness, and divisive tactics, among other character flaws too numerous to count. “George W. Bush and Barack Obama each took the presidency seriously; each man was changed by the office; each viewed himself to be president of all the people,” he writes. “One of Trump’s true innovations as president is to feel no responsibility for Americans who didn’t vote for him. Unlike previous presidents, he works not for reconciliation but for division. On his best days, Trump is numb to the fault lines that run under America—fault lines of region and religion, of class, ideology, and race. On his worst days, his presidency is an inversion of the motto of the United States.”

Divided into four sections—“Falling Apart,” “The Failure of Politics,” “The Age of Trump,” and “Becoming Citizens Again,” The American Crisis covers a lot of relevant ground, from politics and economic inequality to racism (as usual, Kendi and Coates knock it out of the park), health, and the importance of art in times of crisis. Regarding the last, Miranda makes a potent argument about how “all art is political.” In “What Art Can Do,” published in December 2019, he writes, “our job as artists is to tell the truth as we see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it. Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We keep revisiting Shakespeare’s Macbeth because ruthless political ambition does not belong to any particular era. We keep listening to Public Enemy because systemic racism continues to rain tragedy on communities of color. We read Orwell’s 1984 and shiver at its diagnosis of doublethink, which we see coming out of the White House at this moment. And we listen to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, as Lieutenant Cable sings about racism, ‘you’ve got to be carefully taught.’ It’s all art. It’s all political.”

Even readers who have little interest in the mechanics of politics will find something instructive or eye-opening in this book. If nothing else, it will force us to break free of what Applebaum calls our “warm cocoon of self-congratulatory self-confidence” and find “a path between bravado and despair.”

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.