The Washington Post [praise for Garrett Peck's The Great War in America.]
"The story traces America’s journey from geopolitical isolation to engagement and back to a more committed isolation—a retrenchment that Peck considers a mistake. Peck shares plenty of details worthy of their own histories."
Richard Florida
The first decade of the new millennium was an epochal “decade of disruption” as Garrett Peck convincingly describes it, setting the stage for the rise of Donald Trump in our current age of polarization and discord. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the opportunities, challenges and fault-lines facing America and the world today, and how we got here.
The Literary Hill
Peck not only sets out these “key events that Americans shared” in a concise narrative history, but he also offers a thoughtful and informed perspective. He obviously reads wisely and widely, and is able with clarity and logic to explain complex information (such as what led up to the collapse fo the financial market) as well as to call upon pertinent expert for additional analysis. He is exceedingly fair, carefully totting up George W. Bush’s successes and failures and, above all, he is hopeful.
The Wall Street Journal [praise for Garrett Peck's 'The Great War in America.
"Peck’s pointillist picture of America on the home front will be sure to interest World War I buffs.
The Literary Hill - Karen Lyon
Peck not only sets out these “key events that Americans shared” in a concise narrative history, but he also offers a thoughtful and informed perspective. He obviously reads wisely and widely, and is able with clarity and logic to explain complex information (such as what led up to the collapse fo the financial market) as well as to call upon pertinent expert for additional analysis. He is exceedingly fair, carefully totting up George W. Bush’s successes and failures and, above all, he is hopeful.
The Washington Post [praise for Garrett Peck's 'The Great War in America.
The story traces America’s journey from geopolitical isolation to engagement and back to a more committed isolation—a retrenchment that Peck considers a mistake. Peck shares plenty of details worthy of their own histories.
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-16
A lucid history of the first decade of the 21st century, which set trends in motion that are with us today.
What to call that time? Washington, D.C.–based historian Peck dismisses “the aughts” as “too Victorian,” and he suggests that the “decade of disruption” is just about right to describe an era in which technology ravaged entire industries. He examines many other trends that seemed to happen overnight but that took years—e.g., the constantly threatened right of gay couples to marry, the rise of the tea party as a directly racist response to Barack Obama, and the still reverberating consequences of the Great Recession, among them the political polarization that reigns supreme today. Peck has a keen eye for the small but telling detail, such as the fact that Wall Street analysts were publicly promoting the dot-com boom but privately keeping their distance, aware that it was a bubble about to burst. (Make that two bubbles: the internet and the telecommunications sector.) The cynicism of Wall Street and Washington are constant threads, with “shareholder value” and giveaways to the already rich being the main ends of the denizens of both. Disruption holds sway throughout Peck’s narrative, but there are plenty of old-fashioned decadence and con games as well, from the fraudulent Trump University to Tiger Woods’ infidelities. By Peck’s account—and he’s a military veteran—the single greatest mistake of the decade was an act of hubris: “following a false trail of evidence and messianic zeal to overthrow a Middle Eastern dictator,” thus leading to the invasion of Iraq. In his nimble yet fact-dense account, the author enumerates many other errors, from gerrymandering and the expansion of the imperial presidency to the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party and the destruction of the middle class.
A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today. (16 pages of color photos)
