Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton WilliamsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a pretty wide ranging book, especially for its length, that covers a period of recent history and the convulsions of that time. It is an important book to mark and document much of the craziness of that period: roughly from the election of Obama to the Hamas genocidal attack of Oct 7. Williams examines the election and responses to Obama's election, the rise of Trump, COVID, George Floyd and BLM, the loss of objectivity and standards in journalism, cancel culture, Jan 6, and Oct 7.
Williams does a good job of laying things out. He is deeply knowledgeable, careful, and nuanced in his presentations. He is a wonderful writer; and reads his text perfectly for the audio. But the main failing of the book is that Williams doesn't do enough to draw the underlying threads of these trends into any thing approaching a unified set of explanations or diagnosis; and so he fails also to offer much of prescription for what ails. It is a good time capsule of book (which is important) but doesn't offer that much beyond that.
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