The age of grievance

Frank Bruni

Book - 2024

"An examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left. More and more Americans are convinced that they're losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become very popular. Grievance needn't be bad. But what happens when people take their grievances to lengths that they didn't before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dism...iss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there's a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward"--

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Avid Reader Press 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Frank Bruni (author)
Edition
First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition
Physical Description
vii, 269 pages ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781668016435
9781668016442
  • Author's Note
  • 1. Let Me Tell You How I've Been Wronged
  • 2. A Good Word Spoiled
  • 3. Grievance Now versus Grievance Then
  • 4. The Lost Shimmer of the City on the Hill
  • 5. I Love Me, I Hate You, and We Are So Many Rungs Apart
  • 6. Chaos, Clicks, and Catastrophe
  • 7. The Oppression Olympics
  • 8. The Price Is Not Right
  • 9. Don't Be a Stranger
  • 10. The Antidote
  • Acknowledgments
  • Further Reading
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up. In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the "me decade" as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: "'Me Turning Point' would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree." Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, "became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him." Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right--he opens with Sean Hannity's bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants--he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, "not all grievances are created equal," he writes. "There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous." Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: "an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance." A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.