Our next LML Book Club is Tuesday, September 17th, at It's Greek to Me at 5:30 PM, when we will begin the 2024-2025 season with Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to Present by Fareed Zakaria.
In this major work, Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today.
- First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world―and created politics as we know it today.
- Next, the French Revolution, an explosive era that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us today.
- Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Great Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world.
Alongside these paradigm-shifting historical events, Zakaria probes four present-day revolutions: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. For all their benefits, the globalization and technology revolutions have produced profound disruptions and
pervasive anxiety and our identity.
Zakaria suggests that pessimism is premature. If we act wisely, the liberal international order can be revived and populism relegated to the ash heap of history.
