On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake
2021 book
On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake is a non-fiction book by an author, journalist, and international expert on corruption, Sarah Chayes about corruption in the United States. The book was released on November 16, 2021. In this book, Chayes writes about how corrupt systems are organized, laws are changed by bad actors to cover their crimes, and the government is determined by these same bad actors.
Author
Sarah Chayes (born March 5, 1962) is a former senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former reporter for National Public Radio, she also served as special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At Carnegie, Chayes had launched a project on corruption and security, in which she analyzes the structure of authoritarian governments around the world, corruption, and its consequences, the impact of corruption on the possibility of creating crises such as terrorism, revolutions, and their violent consequences, and environmental destruction. She has done considerable field research on this topic.
She received the Radcliffe College History Prize in 1984, Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards (together with other members of the NPR team) for her reporting on the Kosovo War in 1999.
Content
Chayes stated in her interview with Noel King that the overturning of Governor Bob McDonnell's conviction by Supreme Court of the United States turned her to writing this book.
In her book, she classifies America's corruption into two periods. The first period began lifting off roughly from 1870 to 1900, known as the Gilded Age.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake” is 2021 book. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Corruption, America and What, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “2021 book” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117231155. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1962, 1984 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.