We were awash in money and spellbound by celebrity. We ogled at O. J., marveled over Monica, and sent the stock market soaring. It was a time of unprecedented wealth and possibility, it was a time of waste and squandered opportunities.
In the Best of Times (yes, the title is ironic), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson looks back on the decade when Bill Clinton and Bill Gates ran the country--and the rest of us sat back and downloaded it all off the Internet. He opens with a tense, exciting amount of chess master's Gary Kasparov's match with Deep Blue--a defeat of man by machine emblematic of a decade in which, as Thoreau said, we became "tools of [our] tools." He takes us through the work-obsessed halls of Microsoft, the lab that created Dolly the Sheep, and the Hollywood studios that operated on the mantra "dumb and dumber." The book is full of fresh insights into the headlines of the decade: the avalanche of wealth that rewarded some and passed many by; the societal schisms that could be seen from the O. J. Simpson trials to Congress.
With a sharp eye for the quote or detail that perfectly captures a moment in time, Johnson knows just how to tell this story. He serves up no-holds-barred portraits of the key players, for a sorrowful David Geffen, who assures us that movies will only get worse, to Monica Lewinsky as a monument to entitlement. What lies ahead? It's uncertain. We can only hope that Haynes Johnson is there to explain it to us when it happens.
The Best of Times, the product of four years of interviews with America's leaders in politics, business, and science, is in the best tradition of timeless social history--a memorable portrait of the nation at a turning point.
