Part 5, Chapter 15 Summary and Analysis

"Extraordinary Times" is a sweeping meditation on how the world has changed since 1936, the most troubled, unsettling, costly, adventurous, and surprising time in history, marked by horror, war after war, and terror and atrocity as political policy, but also by marvels, progress, and proof things need not stay the same. Great music, painting, fiction, and architecture are produced, and medicine and communications fundamentally changed. Colossal sums are spent as government, industry, and science ally. Science transforms the way people live, steadily improving the quality of life but also creating unheard of levels of fear. Physicists, biologists, and astronomers occupy places in history alongside generals and politicians. The U.S. displaces Europe as the center of world power, new countries emerge, mankind leaves the planet, and the dictionary is filled with new words and changed meanings. In 1936, the Pentagon building...