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    Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future
    Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future
    Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future
    Audiobook5 hours

    Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future

    Written by Michael R. Drew and Roy H. Williams

    Narrated by Michael R. Drew and Roy H. Williams

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Politics, manners, humor, sexuality, wealth, even our definitions of success are periodically renegotiated based on the new values society chooses to use as a lens to judge what is acceptable.Are these new values randomly chosen or is there a pattern? Pendulum chronicles the stuttering history of western society; that endless back-and-forth swing between one excess and another, always reminded of what we left behind.There is a pattern and it is forty years: 2003 was a fulcrum year, as was 1963, its opposite.Pendulum explains where we have been as a society, how we got here, and where we are headed. If you would benefit from a peek into the future, you would do well to listen to this book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 15, 2012
    ISBN9781452679846
    Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future

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    Reviews for Pendulum

    3.5/5

    14 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Surprisingly great book. Expected it to make little sense initially, but after soldiering through and checking up the authors it mentions (and playing around with applying its thesis to the past few years), I have to admit it holds up remarkably well. Will help you broaden your understanding of the cultural and societal processes going around you. Recommended!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I'm a sucker for books that propose/explore historical cycles. This book does that... but really, really, really badly. That said, there is *something* to what they say; I do feel like they have not-quite-put-their-finger on a real cycle. Or an aspect of it. (This is reminiscent of Turchin's Fathers-and-Sons cycle of pre-industrial conflict.) But their "evidence" is... ludicrous. Their presentation more than annoying (books are not PowerPoint presentations!) Their extension of the (possibly real) cyclical pattern they've noticed to Biblical times, to ancient Greece, Rome, the Persians... India, China... WTF-laughable.

      This would have been far (*far*) better if they had just stuck to the last 150 or 200 years of American history, maybe with a little Western Europe (maybe?). I think they went for the glory ("we've discovered a world-historical pattern!" vs "we've discovered a limited, contingent, approximate pattern!") to their great loss. Two stars for the something-something they are getting at, and probably -500 stars for everything else.