The Best of Times: The Boom and Bust Years of America before and after Everything Changed

We were awash in money and spellbound by celebrity and scandal. It was a time of breathtaking strides in science and unprecedented possibility. A time of squandered opportunities and grave distraction. A time of tragic complacency and belief in our invulnerability.

In The Best of Times , Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson looks back on the decade that defied anyone’s expectations, for better or worse. With a sharp eye for the quote or detail that perfectly captures a moment in time, Johnson tells the whole story, no holds barred, of the roller-coaster, self-indulgent nineties when America paid no attention to gathering foreign storms or looming economic collapse.

The product of four years of interviews with the decade’s most influential players, this is in the best tradition of timeless social history–a memorable portrait of the entire wonderful yet woeful decade that ended in the cataclysmic flames of September 11.

A James H. Silberman Book
National Bestseller

Now with a New Foreword, Afterword, and Postscript

In offering this paperback edition of the bubble years, I hope the stories I tell of that newly old America will illuminate how in a few short years we went from the best of times to the worst of times. In my Afterword, I suggest what lessons we must learn from that experience to avoid further disasters and close the circle on some events that typified the period.
–Haynes Johnson
From the new Foreword