The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35). This ambitious and highly readable study draws on the disciplines of biology, anthropology, economics, and political philosophy to chart how various pre-eighteenth-century agrarian societies, beginning with China, India, and the Ottoman Empire, changed from kin-based tribal communities to societies characterized by an impersonal, merit-based bureaucracy that, at least in some cases, encouraged greater individual autonomy. The historical narrative moves to Britain, the creator of what Fukuyama identifies as “modern political order,” defined by a strong state, the rule of law, and accountability by a government to its citizens. Fukuyama cites religion, rather than economic development, as the engine of political development, crediting the medieval Catholic Church with establishing individual property rights and “transparent and predictable law” long before those elements were represented in the British state.

33 Revolutions Per Minute, by Dorian Lynskey (Ecco; $19.99). In this history of protest songs, Lynskey forgoes close readings of the thirty-three songs he has chosen, each heading a chapter, and provides instead sweeping sketches of the cultural moments that gave rise to them. There’s a rushed history of John Lennon’s political development in a chapter on “Give Peace a Chance,” a tour of the birth of punk and the rivalry between the Sex Pistols and the Clash in a chapter on “White Riot,” and a peek into the intense rap of Public Enemy in a discussion of “Fight the Power.” The book is impressive in scope, if thin on critical insight. By ending with a consideration of John Mayer’s insipid “Waiting for the World to Change,” Lynskey makes it clear that the political protest song as we’ve known it is in rough shape.

We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant (Scribner; $25). When Grant’s fifth novel begins, Stephen Newman is a pampered child in postwar California. As it ends, he is a widower in contemporary London mourning his British wife. The intervening pages trace the course of the couple’s life—and the lives of their family and friends—from Oxford, where they experiment with anarchy and LSD, through the “hamster years” of child-rearing, pet-tending, and aborted affairs. The result, clearly intended as a portrait of the baby-boom generation, feels more like a composite sketch. There is no plot—only the passage of time, which forces the characters through history. Emblems of their generation, they dutifully brush up against well-known figures and events: Bill Clinton, the London bombings of 2005. The result is a little like Googling youthful acquaintances. Life loses its immediate heat; the past is reduced to a series of nouns, black words arranged on a cold white background.

The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage; $15). It’s September of 2001, and for Mae, a card dealer at a Nevada casino, the attack on the World Trade Center provokes not horror but a sort of exultation—and, in the newsreel footage, brings the image of a former lover, bloody and overwrought. Mae watches clips of the attack obsessively, and they arouse in her memories of a torturous relationship with her brother and a late-sixties sojourn in a drug-fuelled commune, led by a charismatic Charles Manson type, where sex, love, and sadistic violence were inextricably linked. In his acknowledgments, Bell, the author of a widely admired trilogy of novels set during the Haitian revolution, writes that this book is “the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it.” The litany of cruelties is indeed shocking, but the novel lacks the psychological insight required to provoke a truly visceral response.

Published in the print edition of the May 30, 2011, issue.
