The Age of Grievance

By: Frank Bruni

Narrated by: Frank Bruni

Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni comes a lucid, powerful examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left.

The twists and turns of American politics are unpredictable, but the tone is a troubling given. It’s one of grievance. More and more Americans are convinced that they’re losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become the country’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb.

Grievance needn’t be bad. It has done enormous good. The United States is a nation born of grievance, and across the nearly two hundred and fifty years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When people take their grievances to lengths that they didn’t before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive.

How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward.

©2024 Frank Bruni (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

Bruni is always thoughtful, fair and measured.

I love this book. But I’m listening and now I want to read lots of the books Bruni references. Is there any way to attach a bibliography to the audible version of this book? I will go back and write down the titles if I must. But it would be so, so helpful to have a list of referenced material.

Ground Yourselves

I like that the grievances of Americans has been talked about. Honestly if we grounded ourselves more and took more deep breaths, I think we could find the middle again. The pessimism and negativity has probably eroded our country more than anything else.

Wisdom! Lucidity!

I could not put this down! It’s a remarkably wise, lucid, and humble analysis of a feature of our society that is insanely divisive and harmful. Highly recommended by me.

This book lacks intellectual depth in its narrative.

This book lacks intellectual depth as is expected of a journalist trying to be a narrator of current events. I don’t recall reading Frank Bruni’s work in the past, but based on the intro I expected a different book. I expected a book with more connections to what to expect in the future or an examination of how such grievance becomes part of a society’s identity rather than a book of complaints about society’s shortcomings from one individual’s narrow-minded perspective.

What this book offers more than anything else is the author's belief that the left is solely responsible for all grievances felt by individuals within the United States. It’s subtle, and there is an attempt by the author to achieve balance, but 50% of the way through the book, you realize that the truth is that this author thinks that “we” brought the collapse of the United States on ourselves with our petty grievances, and the intellectual left is to blame.

There is almost no consideration that some of these grievances, even if overstated, are not completely without reason on the left and the right. There is almost no energy given to the idea that some folks' grievances on the right might be misplaced and aligned with some of the fears of the people of the left and vice versa.

I am technically a member of the left, but I disagree with it on many social, economic, and geopolitical issues that form the basis of its social media persona—the one this book attacks. It’s a caricature of the far left and not representative of the normal middle of the left.

The ultimate difference, however, between me and Bruni is, I believe, that I am Black. My understanding of our history is not a set or series of throwaway acknowledgments of past mistreatment or injustices; I am the living embodiment of that history. I can’t throw it away, and that grievance is attached to my existence, not because I can’t let it go, but because society still operates by it.

Contrary to what Frank Bruni believes, I do not expect modern-day whites to solve any of the problems caused by the prior days' whites. I am much more interested in figuring out how we solve our historical problems and improve lives, rather than trying to sell ourselves that those problems are no longer relevant. He clearly believes my grievances are without any merit, though he does not say it directly in this book.

I do not think I can finish the last few chapters of the book because he and I are on opposite sides of the spectrum as it relates to our understanding of grievance and why it is so destructive as a political force. I believe he considers himself a person of the left, but this book is a representation of how far apart we, as citizens of the United States of America, are from our perspective. We do not see the world in the same way at all. We are going to have to be very strong as a country and support our founding structure and ideals, or we will lose everything. I never thought I would see the day as a person born in the early 1980s, but this book more than any other than I have read, has convinced me how broken our society truly is. I recommend this book only if you are interested depressing read that provides no additional understanding of our current predicament whatsoever. Do better, Frank. Good luck to you all in the collapse.