Is Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse , about wokeness , or is it the story of 2020? Yes. Is it a memoir, or is it advancing and building an argument? It’s both. Is it a treatise against “anti-racism,” or a general rebuttal of mad, illiberal ideas? A bit of each. It’s a lot of things and not enough of one.

In his most famous book, A Self-Portrait in Black & White: Unlearning Race, Williams used the memoir format to air a core argument. Namely, of the incoherence of race as a contemporary identity, and in favor of color blindness. That’s a more ambitious argument, yet that book worked so well; it was so persuasive and moving because his argument and personal story were so tightly bound together. His life m

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