James Patterson's Bancroft Prize-winning Grand Expectations, the
penultimate volume in the Oxford History of the United States, was
hailed by The New York Times as "a spirited, sprawling narrative of
American life" and by The Wall Street Journal as "a tour de force."
Now, in the final chronological volume of this acclaimed series,
Patterson again offers an authoritative and vibrant history of a
turbulent period in American life. Restless Giant provides a crisp,
concise assessment of the twenty-seven years between the
resignation of Richard Nixon and the election of George W. Bush, in
a sweeping narrative that seamlessly weaves together social,
cultural, political, economic, and international developments. We
meet the era's many memorable figures-most notably, Ronald Reagan
and Bill Clinton-and explore the "culture wars" where liberals and
conservatives, including a resurgent Religious Right, appeared to
cut the country in two. Indeed, Reagan helped to usher in a
widespread conservative revolution, but even as the Right was
ascendant politically, it did not succeed in reversing more liberal
trends. Patterson describes how, when the Cold War finally ended,
Americans faced bewildering new developments around the world and
discovered-in Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq-that it was far
from easy to direct the outcome of global events. In exploring a
wide range of cultural, social, and economic concerns, Patterson
shows how the persistence of racial tensions, high divorce rates,
alarm over crime, and urban decay all led many writers to portray
this era as one of decline. But Restless Giant offers a more
positive perspective, arguing that our often unmet expectations
caused many of us to view the era negatively, when in fact we were
in many ways better off than we thought. By 2000, most Americans
lived more comfortably than they had in the 1970s, and though
bigotry and discrimination were far from extinct, a powerful rights
consciousness insured that these were less pervasive in American
life than at any time in the past. With insightful analyses and
engaging prose, Restless Giant captures this period of American
history in a way that no other book has, illuminating the road that
the United States traveled from the dismal days of the mid-1970s
through the hotly contested election of 2000.
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