This is an age of misery but also of mystery. Inflation and insurrection, populism and protest, demagoguery and disillusion, turbulence and tyranny — the annals of affliction are full. Abundant, too, are the puzzling questions: Can the centre hold? Is there a centre at all anymore? Can the democracies of North America be governed? Will democracy itself survive?
Our days of distress have left bookshelves crowded with volumes about the perils of the age, much the way the Cromwellian Protectorate lead to the sycophantic poetry of John Dryden, the First World War produced Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the tumultuous but artistically fertile 1960s saw emerge Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, John Edgar Wideman, and many others.
David Marks Shribman teaches in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He won a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1995.
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