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| Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America | 
 enlarge | Author: Rick Perlstein
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $37.50
Buy New: $22.00
You Save: $15.50 (41%)
New (47) Used (13) Collectible (1) from $20.90
Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 1218
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Scribner Hardcover Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 2
ISBN: 0743243021
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.924
EAN: 9780743243025
ASIN: 0743243021
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 This is a brilliant book May 24, 2008
19 out of 43 found this review helpful
Rick Perlstein has exhaustively researched and written a magnificent book, and his extremely thorough look back at the zeitgeist of the era of Richard Nixon should be read by any American of my age group (AARP eligible), or, for that matter, by Americans younger than I am.
Mr. Perlstein may get an ulcer when he reads this, but I was completely engrossed in Nixonland because I admire and worship Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan to this day.
I was in junior high school and high school during the events of Nixonland.
Richard Nixon saved America for us today, and Spiro Agnew articulated the concerns of people like me (I had an Agnew wristwatch in 1970, only to lose it along the way of life) and I couldn't have cared less about Kent State. The destabilizing efforts of those flakes was alien to me.
Friends: go out and buy Nixonland. It is a terrific book, If you are like me, you will be impervious to any suggested opinion. Mr. Perlstein is a pro, and he is not a polemicist. He is a scholar.
 Too Many Unsourced Comments Casts Doubts June 14, 2008
13 out of 21 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating book. However, I quickly noticed that when I would check the notes for the source of some especially outrageous comment, it was absent. This applied mostly to snipes about Nixon, but was also true about other people (across the political spectrum) and many events. There is plenty to dislike about Nixon that can be supported by facts, but Perlstein slathers on snide remarks throughout the book that are personal and unsubstantiated. A fascinating book, yes, but not a "history book" that should be relied upon for a true examination of Nixon and the events surrounding him.
 A Flawed Book May 31, 2008
11 out of 65 found this review helpful
Nixonland is a flawed by factual innacuracies and poor editing. For example, I was on the UC Berkeley campus during the People"s Park protests when a helicopter gassed the campus. There were not several helicopters, just one. And it didn't swoop down on the protestors. It flew in front of Barrows Hall where I was alone on the ninth floor balcony. It released tear gas right in front of me; I was the closest person to it. I also have studied the shooting of the Black Panther Bobby Hutton and I find the details in the book at variance with the most objective accounts. The book also has spelling and grammatical errors that should have been caught by a competent editor. I intend to put this book in its proper place: the garbage.
Another worthy effort from Perlstein June 9, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Nixonland is Rick Perlstein's follow-up to "Before the Storm", which focused largely on Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Though I preferred Perlstein's earlier book this one is pretty damn good. I was born in the 1980s and thus have no first-hand knowledge of what was going on in the 60s and early 70s. Perlstein does a very good job at drawing a vivid portrait of the state of the union at that period. After reading this book, I felt like I had learned a thing or two about why things happened the way they did--why the backlash against civil rights came about, why conservatism reemerged as it did after Goldwater's disastrous campaign, why Nixon managed to become so popular and how he helped define the political landscape.
The book doesn't quite manage the cohesion of its predecessor, though Nixonland manages to paint an accurate and messy picture of America during the Nixon era. It's quite readable, and the detail on display here is impressive.
Nixon w/o Watergate June 19, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
When my father was alive, he used to love reading books by people like David Halberstam and Robert Caro because they wrote long, well-written, detailed works that were driven almost entirely by compelling narrative. Rick Perlstein has done this kind of book one-better. Nixonland is just as good as anything David Halberstam ever wrote, but it's also driven by an argument that's highly relevant to today's politics. Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon is the founder of modern attack politics, positive polarization is the way they described it back in the day. [That's positive in terms of the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party.] Perlstein doesn't make that argument explicitly until the very end, but you can see it coming a mile away and by the end of the book it's a very hard point to contest.
In order to make this argument, Perlstein has to do what some historians might deem impossible, examine Nixon without considering Watergate. "Impossible!," you say? Not if you cut off the story with the 1972 election. Of course, some of the stuff that eventually brought down the administration (like the Watergate break-in itself) makes it into the narrative, but Perlstein's focus is more on the political culture of 1964-72 than it is on Nixon himself. When you look at that culture closely as he does it's hard not to conclude that it's just as toxic (if not more so) than our own.
I've read some reviews of Nixonland here that complain about it being bogged down in trivia - That it all adds up to nothing. To make that argument is to miss the entire point of the book. Richard Nixon's political strategy, indeed the entire political strategy of the Republican Party since Nixon, has been to make mountains out of cultural mole hills in order to obscure the fact that Republican positions do not match the positions of the majority of American voters.
It also helped that Democrats often haplessly played their Republican-cast part of aloof elitists so well. Perlstein does not spare them the criticism they deserve. He even criticizes people who are often treated like sacred cows in democratic circles such as Robert Kennedy. Republicans who criticize Nixonland for partisanship haven't a leg to stand on.
By taking Watergate out of the Nixon administration, Perlstein has allowed us to see history as it unfolded rather than to read Watergate backwards. Unfortunately for Nixon lovers everywhere, this course of action makes it abundantly clear what an unpleasant, amoral, and divisive figure Richard Nixon was even before he betrayed the sacred trust of his high office.
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