The Dark Side of the Moon series is a chronological collection of observations on social, political and occasionally even personal subjects. Each volume provides food for thought, and Freeman encourages readers to cut into them – use and abuse these books, dog-ear the pages, mark up with highlighter and write in the margins. Make them relevant by making them yours.

This fifth and final volume of The Dark Side of the Moon begins with ‘Welcome to the Ever-Changing, Ever-Same Face of America’ and winds up, some 546 pages later, with ‘Disaster Plans that Don’t Bother to Anticipate Disaster’. You could pretty much say those bookend observations were an appropriate metaphor for the intervening years.

We had a brand new President who many Americans felt actually seemed to offer The Audacity of Hope to a nation worn thin. What we got was headlock and deadlock, business pretty much as usual and a growing sense that what needed to be fixed was unfixable. These were the years of the near-past and a look back informs a look forward as we face an assessment of how much was hope and how much merely audacity.