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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: $16.95
You Save: $20.55 (55%)
New (48) Used (13) from $16.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 513
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
Condition: New - may have a small remainder mark on the edge.
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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
12 out of 66 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
12 out of 12 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.
An Important and Magisterial Work June 10, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
A lot has been written over the past week about Barack Obama's historic run for the presidency, and Hillary Clinton's historic near-run, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago, and the general consensus seems to be that we are living in historic times, and that this coming election year is shaping up as one of those watershed-type moments in our history---like 1968, or 1932, or 1876---when the nation finds itself at a kind of directional crossroads and confronted by two radically divergent visions of the nation's future, where the choices we make at the polls this time around could affect the political landscape, in many profound ways, for decades to come.
It's a little ironic, then, that I've been ploughing through this way cool book the past few days as it revolves around the pivotal '68 election and the rise of the modern conservative dialectic that has dominated our national politics from the end of the 1960s to the present day. It is a sobering yet fascinating invocation of an inchoate and messy time of mass discontent in the midst of mass prosperity, with lessons to ponder for the present day, and with sparkling insights and novel interpretations for the reader to digest in every chapter.
Not a lot of people come out of Nixonland looking very good. Gene McCarthy emerges as cold, aloof, a single-issue candidate more interested in poetry than politics. Robert Kennedy appears as a polarizing opportunist who, Perlstein strongly implies (using statistical polling data), would likely have lost the '68 election in a landslide had he lived to secure the Democratic nomination. Hubert Humphrey is an insincere groveler, Nelson Rockefeller a Kissingerian double-dealer, Ronald Reagan a narcissistic martinet, and Richard Daley an American Brezhnev. (Perlstein reminds us that Soviet tanks were rolling through Prague at the same time the Chicago police were committing mass muggings in Grant Park at the '68 convention.) And the sins of the usual peripheral wingnuts---the Lester Maddoxes, the George Wallaces, the Max Raffertys---are all revisited in detail, and they are as horrifying as ever to recall.
But a great many folks on the antiwar left, too, are depicted in less-then-flattering terms: Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, and the SDS and Black Panthers in general all come in for some pretty harsh criticism---in Perlstein's estimation, much of their rhetoric and actions in the run-up to the '68 convention were at best examples of immature delinquency, at worst cases of outright thuggery, and needlessly provocative as a rule---and given the wisdom of 40 years' hindsight, it is hard to argue that a great deal of this criticism isn't richly deserved.
And this calls into focus the uniqueness of Nixonland---it's the first detailed history of American politics in the 1960s that I am aware of to be written by someone who was born after its most formative events took place. To the new generation of historians like Rick Perlstein (b. 1969), it's probably a lot easier to wax less subjectively about this mercurial era in our history than folks like myself who actually lived through all this trauamatizing insanity---to create a work of genuinely objective history, in other words, rather than a narrative that's been artificially flavored by the faulty filter of living memory.
Who comes out looking good in Nixonland? George Romney, for one, though his penchant for speaking his mind to the voters renders him quickly radioactive to the national GOP. George McGovern is depicted as a thoughtful and compassionate man whose '72 campaign team is overpopulated by idealistic numbskulls. And Martin Luther King, preaching nonviolence to the end, is seen in Nixonland as a lonely man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, his voice drowned out by the growing number of militants in his own movement.
Above it all is Nixon himself---at turns ruthless, cruel, cynical, depressed and self-abnegating---but always possessed of a chess player's mind, thinking several moves ahead of his opponents and even his would-be supporters. Given the overall scoundelry of the majority of Nixonland's varied cast of characters, one almost---repeat, almost---becomes sympathetic to the man over the course of the book, for no other reason than this: as Perlstein tells it, he was the flat-out smartest guy in the room, who outguessed, outwitted and simply out-hustled everyone else to the presidency in '68. The fact that he was willing to exploit racist sentiment to rip the nation asunder in the process---well, hey, that's politics, right?
Which brings up my last point: the startling theme that's crucial to Nixonland's narrative is that the defining political issue in America during the 1960s was not Vietnam, as commonly assumed, but race relations---specifically, the white backlash against equal-access and open-housing laws that laid the blueprint for the political realignment that Dick Nixon and his gunsels, such as Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, helped to construct. The war did play a contributing role to the ascent of Movement Conservatism, as Perlstein sees it, but more though the antiwar movement it engendered and the excesses of the countercultural left---and the right's Kulturkampf against it, which continues to this day---that followed. It's no accident that the book starts with the Watts riots---which, Perlstein reminds us, occurred only a few days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Whether you agree with his thesis or not, you will want to read this magisterial work---it's one of the most engaging and thought-provoking of its kind I've ever come across.
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