The early 1990s were supposed to be a period of calm and quiescence. After a half century of cold war, and a previous half century of hot wars, the decade was supposed to mark a respite from the political and ideological conflicts that had ravaged the 20th century. But history did not stop at the turn of the century. While many Americans in 1989 “believed they were witnessing the ultimate victory of liberal democracy,” as John Ganz writes in his new history of the era, When the Clock Broke, “others thought they were observing its death throes.” A whirlwind tour of the myriad right-wing figures that punctuated the George H.W. Bush years, the book shows us how the post–Cold War period was defined by, if anything, too much history: deindustrialization, racist militias, millenarian sects, extremist demagoguery, urban unrest, conspiracy theories, and generalized despair. “If that sounds a lot like the Trump era,” David Klion writes in the August issue, “well, that’s precisely Ganz’s point”: Trump’s reign was the crystallization of all these emergent forces. “The supposedly ascendant United States at the end of history, in other words, already demonstrated all the symptoms of its present maladies.” Read “Did the Early 1990s Break American Politics?”
Told from the perspective of a clueless Westchester housewife named Mimi, Robert Plunket’s Love Junkie is a madcap satire of the AIDS era and all its cruelties and ironies. Its hero is a hapless and prejudiced one, a witness to a queer party scene she has been invited into by her boss, a PR executive. What unfolds as she begins to mingle with fashionable gay yuppies and rough trade is a funhouse version of Madame Bovary, where the exposure of a housewife’s ambitions and avarice doubles as an analysis of an era’s anxieties, giving us an inside perspective from an outsider. As Kate Wolf writes in her essay on the 1992 novel, it is a comic masterpiece, one that shows “the ridiculous lengths we go to in the name of desire but, more importantly, the lies we tell ourselves in order to live amid the suffering of others.” Read “The Cruel Genius of Robert Plunket’s Gay Satires”
Brett Christophers’s account of the market-induced failure to transition to renewables is his latest entry in a series of books demystifying a multi-pronged global crisis.
