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The Fourth Turning : (next reprint)

The Fourth Turning : (next reprint)

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Winter came early this saeculum....
Review: Somehow I missed this book when it first came out- too much was happening in my personal life I guess. Yet, I'm glad that I waited until now to read it, for it serves to verify much that I came to discover on my own from both personal experience and from reading such diverse works as those of the Taoist Sages and Marcus Aurelius. For this is a book of Great Cycles, rooted in the ancient traditional concept of large and small recurrent cycles to human history, as well as to nature.

This book speaks of the Saeculum, to use the ancient term, the great cycles that stretch approximately the span of one long human life. There have been seven of these in the last 500 years of "modern" history. Each of these large cycles is divided into four parts, or "turnings." Think of them as generational seasons. And then each of these generational turnings is associated with one of the four classical human archetypes (prophet, nomad, hero, and artist.)

When you examine the individual Saeculi you realize that everything has happened before. Time is neither uniquely chaotic, nor is it linear. The same pattern of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth occur again and again. The historical documentation is exhaustive- this book serves the secondary function of being an excellent review of Anglo-American history.

It is more than that, though- it is a predictor of what to expect in the rapidly approaching winter or Fourth Turning. Of course, it now looks like winter came too early, for we are trying to cope with it using the techniques and tools of the Third Turning of unraveling and culture war. What we need are the elder statesman or prophets that have guided and inspired us through all our previous periods of crisis. We need our next generation of heroes to come of age. We need time for Merlin to find and teach Arthur. But first, we need the return of the Gray Champion to herald the age.

One other thing, before one becomes too comfortable with the idea that we've always come out of these cycles stronger than the one before, it is best to reflect that Fourth Turnings mean Total War- and we have nuclear devices and material in global abundance....

By the way, the excellent charts and tables make the concepts in the text very easy to rapidly digest.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good History; Interesting & Scary Thesis
Review: It's been a while since I gave attention to Ortega y Gasset's and Julian Marias's generations theory, and I found Strauss & Howe's application quite interesting. The book seems an easy read -- I would expect to find such theories in a rather dry tome on the philosophy of history. That makes me hesitate -- does this theory come together too easily. And I'm always a bit (well, more than a bit) nervous about books that are so given to prophecy. I'm of the "the one way to assure that something will not happen is to declare it ordained by history" school.

Despite those reservations, I found reading _The Fourth Turning_ more than worth my time. The charts are good; the popular-level history seems reasonably accurate; the thesis is sophisticated and intriguing. And scary: if we allow ourselves to be controlled by the patterns Strauss & Howe have observed in the past, it appears there will be a very nasty "turning" within our lifespan.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Finest Socio-History Book Ever Written!
Review: Rarely in life, a reader may stumble upon a work which stunningly redirects one's thinking about an entire subject. After reading such a work, every facet of that subject neatly "falls into place" where it never had before. These works tend to be highly controversial as well as thought provoking. Strauss and Howe's "The Fourth Turning" is one such book. This book is so revolutionary that my entire view of American history has been irrevocably changed by it. I have tested its theories of generational change in discussions with my parents, grandparents, and children and found them to be absolutely true. We are all of differing generations, and our outlook and attitudes show it. When the next Great Crisis comes, we can thank the authors for at least having warned some of us that it was coming. Their cyclical theory simply patterns after life itself. Life doesn't simply and slowly improve over time. Catastrophes occur suddenly and they forever change the future. All of our lives show crisis which suddenly and dramatically change us. Even the history of our planet has undergone sudden and dramatic catastrophes which dramatically altered the course of life on earth. Why should the history of our nation be any different? To those who believe this book is trash, come back and reread it in twenty years and you will have been proven wrong. This book is absolutely one of the best books that I have ever read and deserves the highest recommendation possible.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Junk History/Science
Review: What a bunch of simplistic, wordy, and mindless gibberish. This kind of "Junk History" contributes nothing to the advancement of mankind's journey. It only serves to feed the simplistic and lazy mind to make overdrawn conclusions and in this case this tome tends to lean to the right on the political spectrum. Never has the nation and the world been in such dire need of rational and sound thinking to guide us through this difficult time.

Yet, we are now turing(no pun intended) to this kind of junk thinking, simplistic answers from religious zealots and useless polemics from mindless politicians. If our species is to survive and our enlightened culture to progress, we must reject such simplistic models...the thinking minds among us must do the hard work necessary to discover rational solutions to our most perplexing problems. This book does not contribute to this endeavor.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: fascinating straw dog
Review: they make bold statements and present theory as fact. very intriguing on the surface, but frankly irritating in the lack of scientific process when examined closely. its the "prophesy" of their predictions that we are all interested in, i would imagine, and that was sufficiently vague to satisfy all.


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