| Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America |  | Author: Rick Perlstein
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $13.60
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Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 172944
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
ISBN: 074324303X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780743243032
ASIN: 074324303X
Publication Date: April 14, 2009 (In 228 Days)
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Availability: Not yet published
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. --Tom Nissley
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
About then, about now August 18, 2008
This is a journalist's cultural account of the Nixon years, not a historian's textbook, and not a biography of RMN. It's a great read, filled with fabulous details that historians tend to overlook. Here's Al Capp trying to pick a fight with John Lennon; there's Lorne Greene attacking McGovern for lack of support of Israel.
Three caveats. First, the nature of the book makes it hard to figure out where you are. As others have mentioned, dates aren't given, and he does go back and forth a few times. Second, it's hard to ignore the possibility that Perlstein may be reading the present into the past. His approach is so anecdotal -- not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of focusing on small things that are supposed to represent larger things -- that we are at his mercy. For example, he quotes letters written to Time magazine. This adds color, but also forces us to trust the author that these items really are representative.
Third: we don't get to see Nixon tossed out of office. The book ends before.
 Disappointing: expected more August 13, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I had heard good things about Nixonland and it started out very well. Unfortunately, Perlstein perpetuates a lot of the mythology of that period and could not repress his own biases in his discussion of Richard Nixon and his times. As previous reviewers have noted, this book is loaded with inaccuracies and poor research but of greatest importance, he misses (or miscasts) the central tragedy of that period and Nixon. Richard Nixon pursued the presidency as an idealist, believing in the purity of the presidency and his unique capabilities to straighten out our country and its position in the world. He inherited all of JFK's and LBJ's social programs and turmoil with their huge costs, an all-consuming Cold War in progress with the Soviet Union and China, a full-up hot war in Vietnam with nearly half a million troops 10,000 miles away and its costs, and a huge space program costing yet more. It was a political and fiscal train wreck that was almost beyond any one president's powers to rectify. Perlstein also glosses over the "antiwar" movement, focusing on immaterial areas like the hippies and the Socialist Worker's Party's "New Mobe" while completely missing or avoiding the direct connections of the US Communist Party, its umbrella People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and their direction of the schedules, sustainment, and "thrust" of nation wide pro-enemy activities. In Perstein's account, there isn't any mention of the continuous flow of activists travelling to Hanoi to meet with the enemy or the return flow of propaganda and guidance that came from the North Vietnamese. Nixon was rigidly opposed by the nation's media who held a complete monopoly on the information given to the people in those days as "news" and the law enforcement agencies watched mutely as treasons were committed and American lives lost. It's a shame. Nixon was a rare individual and he had enormous talents but the deck was stacked against him. Too bad Perlstein couldn't get past his own leftist biases to come up with a more accurate picture.
 Insightful history of the US 1955-1975 August 3, 2008
The book gives a detailed and insightful history of US politics 1955-1975, roughly the "Era of Nixon." Anyone who lived through those times, or anyone who is interested in the principal trends of American politics, will benefit from this analysis. It's really a very good book.
Not what I expected August 1, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
I thought it was going to be a visitors' guide to a new theme park.
Well, it was still pretty good.
NIxonland: Still With Us Today? July 27, 2008
A sprawling, compulsively readable tale of a divided America spinning out of control over an unpopular, divisive war and civil rights and social justice issues. Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon helped end the consensus on Great Society liberalism, and divided America along lines that still divide her. Perlstein paints a picture of Richard Nixon as a brooding, jealous loner, filled with resentments against more privileged opponents like the Kennedys, but also a master demagogue and mass manipulator who achieved election to the Presidency by playing on emergent generational and racial divisions. Perlstein does a good job of weaving the distinctive music and culture of the 60s into the tale. Apparently hastily written in places, loose with some facts, and a bit repetitive at times (e.g., Perlstein seems enamored of the phrase 'soiling humiliation' when discussing Nixon trolling for votes), this is nonetheless a first-rate history of a turbulent era, the effects of which are still being felt today.
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