Restless Giant provides a concise assessment of the twenty-seven years between the resignation of Richard Nixon and the election of George W. Bush. We meet the era’s memorable figures and explore the ‘culture wars’ between liberals and conservatives that appeared to split the country in two. Patterson offers a positive perspective, arguing that by 2000 most Americans lived more comfortably than they had in the 1970s and though bigotry and discrimination were far from extinct, they were less pervasive in American life.