The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years
InThe Best of Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes  Johnson follows his illuminating, bestselling overview of the Reagan years,Sleepwalking Through  History, with a chronicle of America in the '90s, a time he finds both  highly consequential and infuriatingly paradoxical.Johnson divides his ambitious social history of an America at its "zenith" of  power and influence into four intertwined sections. "Technotimes" opens with the  Kasparov/Big Blue chess match, and quicksteps through the dizzying advances in  computer science and bio-technology, including the Human Genome Project,  cloning, and genetically modified crops. "Teletimes," easily the strongest and  most disturbing section, uses the "scandalous spectacle" of the O.J. Simpson  trial to illustrate the inescapable influence of the mass media and the  metastasizing cult of celebrity. "Scandal Times" is primarily an extended  retelling of the Monica Lewinsky affair and its squandering (in Johnson's eyes)  effect on the Clinton presidency, while "Millennial Times," calling on polls and  interviews with a crosscut of college students, is a statistical and personal- opinion snapshot of America in full end-of-century stride. Johnson juxtaposes  narrative summary with capsule biographies of the famous (Bill Gates) and the  obscure (Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider--visionaries of hypertext, the World  Wide Web, and the Internet). Johnson's methodology is commendable. He inserts  personal biases lightly (sometimes too tepidly), preferring to present many  sides of issues and ask questions rather than opine. One serious weakness is the  book's woefully inadequate endnotes.ThoughThe Best of Timeshas a tendency to overreach, sometimes scurrying  past subjects rather than studying them, it is an informative, worthy, and  accessible summary of contemporary American society. Johnson has created a  literate time capsule, one whose value will increase greatly with each passing  year.--H. O'Billovitch