Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future

Politics, manners, humor, sexuality, wealth, even our definitions of success are periodically renegotiated based on the new values society chooses to use as a lens to judge what is acceptable.

Are these new values randomly chosen or is there a pattern? Pendulum chronicles the stuttering history of western society; that endless back-and-forth swing between one excess and another, always reminded of what we left behind.

There is a pattern and it is forty years: 2003 was a fulcrum year, as was 1...