The Great Wave: Read of the Week (May 26 to June 1)

In the 21st century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger.

As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider — the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, like Donald Trump, and others have provided inspirational leadership, like Volodymyr Zelensky. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. Writing with a critic’s incisive understanding of cultural trends, Michiko Kakutani’s new book, The Great Wave, outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward.

Michiko Kakutani is a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic and the former chief book critic of the New York Times and has many bestselling works to her credit.