The Island: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Puerto Rico

NBC News Senior White House Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez offers a forceful, necessary exposé on the precarious realities and politics of modern Puerto Rico, detailing the decade of financial exploitation, federal negligence, and American ambivalence that pushed the most populous US territory to the brink and examining what must be done to insure the island’s survival.

On September 16, 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, leaving the island devastated and largely without power for weeks. Slow to respond to the severity of the storm and the logistics of the island’s geographic isolation, the Trump administration faced harsh criticism for its lack of preparedness. While Maria exposed the federal government’s ineptitude and inability to aid Puerto Rico in its time of greatest need, the storm also laid bare a crisis decades in the making, a slow-motion train wreck of American neglect, institutional exploitation, and financial ruin.

Now veteran NBC News reporter Gabe Gutierrez, who has covered the island’s storms and its people for years, tells the urgent story of how Puerto Rico came to this precarious moment in its history, uncovering how decades of failed US policies have culminated in the tumultuous last ten years. Whether it’s the US hedge funds who leveraged the island into bankruptcy, or the federal bureaucracy that has robbed the island of the autonomy to shape its own destiny, the mismanagement of Puerto Rico has stretched across presidential administrations and political parties.

As The Island reveals, with each passing year, with each storm, this negligence comes at a steeper price to US taxpayers, but more importantly to those who live there. With moving portraits of the people working to preserve Puerto Rico for future generations, Gutierrez demonstrates the human cost that accompanies lack of representation in Washington and the toll it takes on everyday Puerto Ricans as they fight to keep their vibrant island home.

What emerges is an eye-opening narrative of American ambivalence about an island so deeply tied to our uncomfortable, imperial past. A seasoned journalist’s ambitious examination of what it takes to change American institutions, The Island shows how our failure to care adequately for Puerto Rico is a failure to reckon with our own history.

© 2025 HarperAudio (Audiobook): 9780063336384

Release date

Audiobook: September 9, 2025