In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir
Fukuyama now seeks to set the record straight ... This fresh attempt to clarify his position is styled by Mr. Fukuyama as a memoir, but it is better seen as a series of meditations ... The book’s style is more professorial than memoirist.
Purely as a memoir, I should say, this one is disappointing. Fukuyama loses interest in telling his own life story around page 60. The fun and revealing anecdotes are front-loaded ... Fukuyama wants to be able to say I told you so. And on these grounds, his book does remind us that he did. But there is little comfort in this. What he has identified is a human problem: the blink of an eye that separates utopia from dystopia. We got what we always wanted, but it is not enough and never will be.
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The most dramatic passages of his memoir describe Fukuyama’s break with his neoconservative milieu over the war in Iraq ... Less...a personal memoir than as an inner monologue of post-cold war liberalism ... The memoir is not the apologia of a prophet whose prophecy failed. It is the record of a moment when liberalism learnt to live in the present tense.
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