The Fourth Turning
 | Broadway, 1997, Paperback Customer Rating: 81 reviews Recommend |
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First came the postwar High, then the Awakening of the '60s and '70s, and now the Unraveling. This audacious and provocative book tells us what to expect just beyond the start of the next century. Are you ready for the Fourth Turning?
Strauss and Howe will change the way you see the world — and your place in it. In The Fourth Turning, they apply their generational theories to the cycles of history and locate America in the middle of an unraveling period, on the brink of a crisis. How you prepare for this crisis — the Fourth Turning — is intimately connected to the mood and attitude of your particular generation. Are you one of the can-do "GI generation," who triumphed in the last crisis? Do you belong to the mediating "Silent Majority," who enjoyed the 1950s High? Do you fall into the "awakened" Boomer category of the 1970s and 1980s, or are you a Gen-Xer struggling to adapt to our splintering world? Whatever your stage of life, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for America's next rendezvous with destiny.
The Fourth Turning continues the project of mapping out the place of generations in history, a project begun in the authors' earlier books Generations and 13th Gen. If millennial fever takes hold, The Fourth Turning may be only the first of an impending wave of pseudo-scholarly tracts prognosticating future (but imminent!) doom as we collectively close the books on this millennium. Those expecting a serious or dry tome might be put off by the authors' taste for bulleted text and catchy phrasings, but can you blame these guys for wanting to make impending peril as exciting as possible? After all, they think we are headed toward "events on par with the Revolution, the Civil War, or World War II" in the next 20 years. Mixing solid understanding of present generational divisions, with some fairly broad generalizations, Strauss and Howe promise to move from history to prophecy. Fans of Future Shock, Megatrends, or Powershift will be familiar with the authors' style of writing and not at all put off by the book's reach or style. Their take on history provides an intriguing (if not always reliable) lens through which to view the past, present, and maybe even the future.
Title: The Fourth Turning
Sales Rank: 1438 in Books
Author: William Strauss, Neil Howe
Publisher: Broadway, 1997-12-29, Paperback, 400 pages, ISBN: 0767900464
Package Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches, 0.95 pounds
- Everything Old is New Again
- Ancient Romans knew of the cyclical nature of advanced human societies. The word "cycle" is associated with the word saeculum, which is the length of a long human life, or the time it takes for all of society to renew itself - and forget what happened before, forget history.
In fact Roman historians noticed a strong correlation between good times, decadence,… More reviews
- An absolutely brilliant book!
- My short description hardly begins to do it justice, but Strauss and Howe have authored an absolutely brilliant book that will change the way in which we view history and our place in it. If we look back in time, we see that a great depression, followed by a major war, has occurred roughly every 80 years for the last several hundred years. We know that the… More reviews
- History Looked at Scientifically
- I first read "The Fourth Turning" after seeing the authors on TV after the 9/11 attacks. I enjoy reading about history and found the book quite interesting in that it wasn't a history book per se, but a look at historical events and society's reaction to those events. It not a book that you can read and look into the future and… More reviews
- Life-Changing!
- Behind the Bible, this is one of the most life-changing books I have ever read! While the book is a solid academic work, it clearly spells out a warning of bad times coming from the perspective of the authors in the late 1990's. The vast majority of the predictions made toward the end of the book have come to pass.
This book… More reviews
- Highly relevant
- Why are these guys not on Larry King or 60 Minutes or Glenn Beck? You can read all of the other reviews that discuss how accurate their forecasts are. Suffice to say the authors forecasted a crisis catylst "in 2008" with the advent of the "Great Devaluation". You've got to be kidding me! They wrote this book at the height of the… More reviews
