Book: The Time of Our Lives

Overview

Peggy Noonan gathers a lifetime's perspective in a collection of columns, speeches and essays that move between politics, culture, history and faith. Written with a rhetorician's ear and a storyteller's eye, the pieces read like conversations with an attentive, moral-minded observer who insists that language, character and memory shape public life. The tone is at once elegiac and urgent: affectionate toward American traditions yet sharply critical when leaders and institutions fall short.
The selections range from campaign-season commentary to meditations on the nature of citizenship, often anchored by personal anecdote. Noonan draws on her experience as a presidential speechwriter and as a columnist to offer both diagnosis and prescription, urging Americans to recover virtues such as dignity, seriousness and responsibility.

Main Themes

A persistent theme is the importance of character in public life. Noonan argues that policy alone cannot sustain a republic; the temperament and rhetoric of leaders matter. She defends the power of elevated speech and ceremonial language to bind citizens to a shared story, and warns that cynicism, contempt and constant outrage corrode civic trust.
Another strand concerns faith, family and history as stabilizing forces. Noonan treats religion not as doctrine to be debated but as a source of moral habit and communal identity. She reveres institutions that transmit memory, families, churches, museums, seeing them as bulwarks against the fragmentation of modern life. Cultural commentary dovetails with political critique: angst about celebrity culture, the flattening of seriousness, and the loss of a common narrative about what America stands for recurs throughout the essays.

Style and Structure

The prose is conversational, often cinematic, with a gift for vignette and a talent for turning small, concrete scenes into larger arguments. Sentences can be arresting and crafted to be read aloud; Noonan's ear for cadence shows the influence of speechwriting. The arrangement of pieces emphasizes variety: short, punchy columns sit beside longer reflections and excerpts of speeches, giving the reader both quick takes and sustained argument.
Noonan balances rhetorical flourish with plainspoken common sense. Her conservative instincts are evident but she frequently frames judgments in moral rather than partisan terms, appealing to virtues that cross party lines even as she critiques contemporary political actors.

Notable Essays and Passages

Several essays stand out for their synthesis of memory and public critique. Reminiscences about political figures, heroes and disappointments, are used to illustrate broader points about leadership and the alarms of the present. Descriptions of civic rituals and national ceremonies are written with particular affection, demonstrating how shared practices shape character and cohesion.
Political columns in the collection respond to immediate events but are tethered to perennial questions: what kind of people does a republic produce, and what rhetoric best summons them? Even when engaging with specific administrations or controversies, the pieces tend to return to timeless concerns about honor, courage and prudence.

Conclusion

The collection reads as a sustained plea for seriousness in an era prone to spectacle and simplification. It will appeal to readers who appreciate reflective, rhetorically alive commentary that marries personal recollection with public argument. While critics may find occasional partisan tilt or repetition of familiar themes, the overarching impulse is restorative: to remind citizens that language, memory and character remain indispensable to the health of democratic life.