Name: Dan Dugan's review of Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
Item: Nixonland
Rating: 4
Author: Dan Dugan

Rick Perlstein

An account of the thirty-seventh presidency sets Nixon's administration against a backdrop of the tumultuous civil rights movement while offering insight into how key events in the 1960s set the stage for today's political divides, in a chronicle that documents such events as the Watts riots and Nixon's landslide reelection. 60,000 first printing.

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Nixonland

Rob Hart

Nixon isn’t the devil, but he was a low level demon who worked his way pretty high up into the leadership of hell because that is where he aspired to be.

Dan Dugan

Reading ~900 pages on Richard Nixon and not reaching his resignation by the book's conclusion might feels like a pretty crazy thing to do, but I can say with all honesty that Nixonland is one of the most enjoyable – and interesting – history books I've ever read.

Along with a fascinating overview of Nixon's early life, Perlstein captures the mood of the late 60s incredibly well; using a number of pop cultural references that, as well as lightening and otherwise dense book, help explain how America's attitude to politics changed over time.

Most importantly however, the book tells the story of how Nixon took advantage of a new "cultural populism" that rejected many of the advances made under the New Deal and the Great Society projects. By stoking a resentment towards liberals, the media, celebrities and academics, Nixon was able to access parts of the American electorate that had, up until that point, been off limits for Republicans. And in doing so, widen the gap between the two sides of the American public.

Nixon will be remembered for Watergate, but Perlstein wants you to remember him as the President that fermented the culture war that (seeminlgy) the entire world now takes part in.

Daniel Bower

Reading ~900 pages on Richard Nixon and not reaching his resignation by the book's conclusion might feels like a pretty crazy thing to do, but I can say with all honesty that Nixonland is one of the most enjoyable – and interesting – history books I've ever read.

Along with a fascinating overview of Nixon's early life, Perlstein captures the mood of the late 60s incredibly well; using a number of pop cultural references that, as well as lightening and otherwise dense book, help explain how America's attitude to politics changed over time.


Most importantly however, the book tells the story of how Nixon took advantage of a new "cultural populism" that rejected many of the advances made under the New Deal and the Great Society projects. By stoking a resentment towards liberals, the media, celebrities and academics, Nixon was able to access parts of the American electorate that had, up until that point, been off limits for Republicans. And in doing so, widen the gap between the two sides of the American public.


Nixon will be remembered for Watergate, but Perlstein wants you to remember him as the President that fermented the culture war that (seeminlgy) the entire world now takes part in.

Ivan Shiel

It's not often a political biography can be called a page turner but this definitely can. It remains so gripping by bypassing stats and eye watering legal debates in favour of those key details that paint a vivid picture of its characters. Throughout there are details about the culture of the period, all to ensure that we don't just know that people voted for Nixon but perhaps why they voted for Nixon. 

Nixon once supposedly said that when he looked in the mirror he saw no one there. In this book Nixon is simultaneously a man of basic motivations and yet also enigmatic. Eventually all that mendacity makes him mysterious. Will you understand him any better at the end of this book? Perhaps not. But then the real mystery is why people voted for him - and that becomes a lot clearer. Ultimately this is a horror story, telling us how Nixon may have ended in political disgrace but probably did more to form the future of American politics than anyone else.

Misha

Sara Bean Duncan

Celine Nguyen ✿

An exciting e-format containing 27 video clips taken directly from the CBS news archive of a brilliant, best-selling account of the Nixon era by one of America’s most talented young historians. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know today was born. Nixonland begins in the blood and fire of the Watts riots-one week after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and nine months after his historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater seemed to have heralded a permanent liberal consensus. The next year scores of liberals were thrown out of Congress, America was more divided than ever-and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Six years later, President Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment borne of that blood and fire, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's, and the outlines of today's politics of red-and-blue division became already distinct. Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: • Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods, while suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns. • The civil war over Vietnam, the assassinations, the riot at the Democratic National Convention. • Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him. • The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other down in the streets over political differences. •And, finally, Watergate, the fruit of a president who rose by matching his own anxieties and dreads with those of an increasingly frightened electorate--but whose anxieties and dreads produced a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office.

Rob Hart &
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

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Rob Hart &Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

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Rob Hart &
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein