A fascinating work of global history and look to the future.
The riveting follow-up to The Fourth Turning.
In 1997, entrepreneur and history buff Howe published The Fourth Turning with William Strauss. In that book, they laid out a clear cyclical pattern of Anglo-American history that occurs in units of 80 to 100 years, called a saeculum, which are further divided into roughly two-decade increments called turnings. The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism when a new order arises. The Second, Awakening, is a turbulent era when the new order comes under attack. The Third is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions when the order decays. The Fourth is a Crisis, when values change and another civic order moves in. Generous with specific examples as well as charts and graphs, Howe delivers a vivid chronicle of 700 years of Anglo-American saecula, emphasizing key events and four archetypes dominating each generation: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist. According to the author, the current saeculum began after World War II, when the U.S. became confident and powerful but also bland and conformist. The second turning, the “Consciousness Revolution,” from the 1960s tumult to the tax revolts of the 1980s, featured personal liberation and increasing disorder. The third, the raucous “Culture Wars,” began as Reagan’s 1980s optimism peaked and “ground to exhaustion with the post-9/11 wars in the Mideast.” We are now embroiled in the fourth, the “Millennial Crisis,” which began with the global market crash of 2008 and continued with the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarian populism. This saeculum, writes Howe confidently, in the early 2030s, and its successor will feature a surprising number of positive features, including America’s continued global leadership. That history runs in cycles has always preoccupied a scattering of historians and attracted a fervent following. Skeptics may roll their eyes, but all readers should enjoy this wild ride by an entertaining writer who seems to have read every relevant source.
A fascinating work of global history and look to the future.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781982173739
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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