Friday, October 30, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
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. 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. Madeleine Brand is an award-winning American journalist, interviewer and radio host whose career has spanned more than three decades in public media. A Los Angeles native, she has become one of Southern California’s most recognizable voices in journalism, known for combining serious reporting and probing interviews with an accessible, conversational style. Brand is currently the host of KCRW’s Press Play, the award- winning daily news and culture program she created in 2013. The show covers politics, culture, and the defining issues of the day. Previously, she worked at NPR for 13 years, where she was a correspondent and later the host for the news magazine show, Day to Day. She has won numerous national and local awards for her reporting and interviewing. A Los Angeles native, she graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in English and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, where she later taught documentary radio.