One of my pet peeves is that many books that promise to talk about the future spend 80%+ of the pages talking about the past.

I understand that the past is useful to set the stage, learn lessons, and see patterns.

However, I wish futurists would flip the ratio, so we spend 20% of the time analyzing the past.

The book is divided into 3 parts:

1: The Invention of America:
- The regime
- The land
- The people

2. American Cycles
- Changes
- Institutional and socioeconomic cycles

3. The Crisis and the Calm
- Tremors
- 2020s crisis
- Aftermath

As you can see, it's only near the end that we get to the meat of the book - at least why I picked it up.

Friendman is an outstanding historian and makes astute observations.
He loves talking about the Founding Fathers.

After a turbulent 2020s (the storm), he expects new cycles in the 2030s that solve the 2020s.

In 2080-2105, a socioeconomic cycle will happen.
It's unclear to me what will happen and I didn't fully buy his 30/50-year cycles.
I'm unconvinced that they will repeat.

What's clear is that he's bullish about America's future, even though he expects the 2020s to be hard.
But the USA will emerge stronger.

I had high hopes for this book, but was sorely disappointed. Friedman puts forth two theories of change over the course of history for the United States. One is institutional that occurs approximately every 80 years and one is economic/social that occurs every 50 years. He postulates that these two are going to occur at the same time for the first time in the 2020s. I found his arguements to be weak in that the facts he has used to develop his theory ignore several times where they occurred between his time cycles with just as much impact. His observation that the George W. Bush presidency was the last where we experienced calm left me somewhat perplexed. Overall, I found this book to be much less than I had anticipated based on the author's background.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook  page.