ISBN Restless Giant ( The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore ) book English Hardcover 496 pages

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.