The Best of Times

From Barnes & Noble

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Haynes Johnson follows up his classic look at the Reagan years, Sleepwalking Through History, with this masterful look at America in the 1990s. In many ways, these were "the best of times": incredible advances in technology abounded, as the Internet was introduced and the human genome was cracked; the economy boomed, as tech stocks came to the fore and dot-coms ruled the land; the country was at peace. But there was a dark side to the decade as well: overwhelming gossip mongering, scandal, and the highly partisan impeachment of a popular president who'd been "forgiven" by his constituents. Johnson, adroit and informative as ever, brings us the highs and the lows of one incredible decade.

From The Critics

Darva Conger. Johnnie Cochran. Bill Gates. Dick Morris. Are you really ready to read a 600-page book about these people? Do you even remember who Darva Conger was? (Hint: She got married on TV.) A mere ten months after Monica Lewinsky's phone-sex partner fled the White House in a cloud of pardons, ringing the curtain down on a decade that began with the implosion of the Soviet Union and ended with the fizzling of the dot-com boom, the author of Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years has won the race to publish the first big book about the '90s.

According to Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman turned historian, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years is the story of "an era characterized by accumulation of wealth and self-indulgence," as well as a growing sense on the part of ordinary Americans that "something was wrong with their society." If that has a familiar ring, it may be because Johnson freely acknowledges having taken as his model one of the most influential works of popular history ever written, Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a breezy chronicle of life in the Roaring '20s that came out in 1931 and is still in print today.

For all its simplifications and superficiality, Only Yesterday remains a minor masterpiece of journalistic evocation—no other book has done so much to shape our view of America in the '20s—and The Best of Times shares some of its virtues. Like Allen, Johnson has a sharp eye for the telling vignette, and it was a stroke of near-genius to open his book on the fateful day in the spring of 1997 when Garry Kasparov, the greatest grand master inthe history of chess, was defeated by IBM's chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue, a barely remembered event that offers a dead-on-target illustration of Johnson's argument that the '90s were characterized by a dangerously arrogant faith in the redemptive power of science and technology.

No less suggestive is his portrait of mass-culture media mogul David Geffen, whom Johnson asked to speculate about what American culture might look like a decade from now: "The future will be so pathetic that the Nineties will look attractive because of it ... Books will be less well written. Television will become even dumber than it is now, and it just seems to get dumber and dumber. And movies will be less good. Every once in a while there will be a terrific movie, and we'll be astounded by it. We'll celebrate the person who makes it because it will be so much rarer than it once was."

Alas, The Best of Times is twice as long as the wonderfully concise Only Yesterday, and unlike Allen, Johnson devotes too much space to too few topics—his discussion of the O.J. Simpson case seems to go on almost as long as the trial did. Obsessed with politics, technology and electronic journalism, he pays little attention to art, be it high or low; indeed, the biggest failing of the book is that Johnson has only a limited interest in the popular culture that sets the tone of postmodern American life. This may be a function of his age—it is suggestive that he turned to such icons of the '60s and '70s as Norman Lear and Carole King to comment on entertainment in the Clinton era—but whatever the reason, it gives the book a dated feel. For the most part, Johnson apparently sees little more to contemporary pop culture than celebrity worship run amok, and it says much about his perspective that he has written a history of America in the '90s in which the word "hip-hop" never appears, though he finds room for two pages about Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, the TV show on which Darva Conger married Rick Rockwell.

What makes The Best of Times worth a close reading is not Johnson's grumpy editorializing but his crisp reportage. Infinitely more compelling than any of his recycled tales of high jinks in the Clinton White House, for example, is the chapter in which he visits a high school in South Central L.A. and chats with a seventeen-year-old boy named John: "He talks about Michael Jordan, the one person he admires most, recalls how Jordan's father was killed, and how Jordan went on from there. 'I think he got values and whatever,' he says. 'I got values, but not really, you know.' Asked to explain, he says, 'Values, but none that mean nothin' to nobody. Probably mean somethin' to me, but the next person don't care.' "

It is in such sharply lit anecdotes that The Best of Times succeeds in telling us something important about what happened to America in the final decade of the twentieth century. "Values and whatever": That is an admirably pithy summing-up of the morally muddled age of Bill Clinton and the ambitious baby boomers who saw in him a living symbol of their own decayed idealism.
—Terry Teachout

Publishers Weekly

As he did with the 1980s in Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Johnson reevaluates what happened to America in the '90s and paints a warts-and-all portrait that may shock many Americans and force others to review the new millennium's values. Picking up where he left off in Sleepwalking, Johnson describes the 1990s as "an era characterized by accumulation of wealth and self-indulgence." He then delves into the events that brought us to where we are today, a country split so evenly culturally, politically and economically that the last presidential election ended in a dead heat. Johnson casts a cynical eye on what he sees as a nation of voyeurs, fixated on reality shows, the Internet, celebrities, screaming pundits and with an utter contempt for privacy. He begins his quest in 1990 with a stagnant America stuck in a recession and adrift politically. Change starts to come with the birth of the quintessential information tool, the Internet clearly the event of the decade in Johnson's view. He then goes on to the one event that most pointedly revealed the U.S. as a celebrity-obsessed society: the O.J. Simpson trial. In blistering prose, Johnson describes the Kato-Kaelining of America: the ubiquitous talking heads on TV, the "disgraceful attack talk-radio programs" that proliferated at this time, "and a media that focused more on trivial concerns, on scandals and celebrities." In retrospect, it seems the country was ripe for Bill Clinton. "I've tried to shut my body down, sexually, I mean," the president told Dick Morris, according to the Starr Report, "but sometimes I slipped up and with this girl I just slipped up." Clinton's "slip-up"gave the ultimate smoking gun to his enemies. Johnson traces the right wing's paranoia about Clinton from Whitewater to the death of Vince Foster, to Travelgate and Filegate, and asserts that there was no wrongdoing on the president's part. Johnson's parade of characters includes the usual dreary suspects: Ken Starr, the special prosecutor whose office, according to Johnson, perpetrated "a disgraceful episode in the annals of American jurisprudence"; Monica Lewinsky, touchingly ingenuous one moment, scheming the next; Linda Tripp, who comes across here, as she appeared to many at the time, as a sordid character; and, of course, the news media, caught in a frenzy that, according to Johnson, "is motivated by a desire to become the next Woodward and Bernstein, to discover scandal where in fact none exists." The encouraging news? The American people didn't buy the media hype. Johnson defines the schism among Beltway Washington, the media, and the American public: "From beginning to end," Johnson writes, "the American people display great maturity and sound judgment as they assess the scandal being reported so incessantly and excessively. And from the beginning, the overwhelming public reaction stands in stark contrast to the view of the scandal as reported form the political insiders of Washington.'' America from 1990 to 2001 from impeachment to recession, the rise of the Internet to the fall of Nasdaq, and the upheaval of the 2000 elections is covered in startling detail by Johnson. He has written a magnetic book that every thoughtful American will want to read. 150,000 printing; BOMC main selection; History Book Club selection; author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A near-fanatical public demand for scandals was the most distinguishing trait of the Nineties, states Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of 13 books, including Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years. Dramatic advances in computer technology, communications, and biomedical research and upheavals in the corporate economy were hardly noticed by a society demanding shocking details about the O.J. Simpson "trial of the century" and the Lewinsky affair an overindulgence happily gratified by the electronic media, especially the Internet. Johnson is at his best when providing narratives, based on many interviews, of President Clinton, who degraded the presidency while further disconnecting the people from their government; Monica Lewinsky, the spoiled "sad little fat girl"; and Independent Counselor Kenneth Starr, who sold his political soul for a futile attempt to impeach President Clinton. Ultimately, the Nineties, according to Johnson, will be remembered as a time of squandered opportunities despite U.S. global preeminence and a booming economy. Johnson at time preaches and belabors issues, but his clear writing and thought-provoking investigations should send this book up the best sellers lists. Strongly recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An absorbing survey of America's second Gilded Age. Veteran journalist Johnson (The System, 1996, etc.) borrows a page from social historian Frederick Lewis Allen in sketching an account of "what in the future may be considered a distinct era in American history"-namely, the trend- and scandal-ridden 1990s. Four large themes occupy much of this unchallenging, reader-friendly study. On the first, the explosion of technology, Johnson ranges from gee-whiz optimism to should-we-worry pronouncements, echoing Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov's comment on his loss to an IBM computer called Big Blue, "I'm a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid." On the second theme, the growing cult of celebrity and media power, Johnson offers well-honed observations on the now-shopworn O.J. Simpson murder trial and some of its attendant ironies, including a surge in SUV sales following the infamous Bronco chase; he is less successful at capturing the spirit of media tycoons such as David Geffen and Michael Bloomberg, both of whom he profiles. On the third, American culture and society at the dawn of the millennium, Johnson closely follows the ups and downs of the market, fashions, college-exam scores, and other telling indicators of modern life, while on the fourth, the career of William Jefferson Clinton, he does a solid job of portraying a president who survived his terms in office largely because his enemies persistently "misread the American public," which, it seems, was more concerned with riding the wave of prosperity than punishing its leader for his considerable sins. Johnson's approach is History Lite, with no discernible ideology, which makes thisa strong candidate for use in survey courses. A useful summary of recent events-and one that does Allen proud. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; History Book Club selection; author tour