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 enlarge | Author: Rick Perlstein
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $37.50
Buy New: $11.40
You Save: $26.10 (70%)
New (45) Used (19) Collectible (1) from $11.40
Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 2189
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:
 Disappointing: expected more August 13, 2008
4 out of 12 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
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 10 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
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Perlstein Land July 19, 2008
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Perlstein is a scion of the 60s. Through reading a lot of newspapers and mining a lot of television, he has constructed an imaginary world called Nixonland. Nixonland, like Hobbitland, exists in the mind of the fabulist. Perlstein has also reconstructed, in this same manner, many of the events of the 50s and 60s in fascinating and often compelling narrative detail. As a popular history of these times, Nixonland is an exciting and sometimes fresh read. As a paradigm for understanding America in the postwar era, the concept of `Nixonland' is extremely limited. The limitations of the concept are readily apparent, for example, in the race narrative that Perlstein grapples with throughout the book.
To conclude, as Perlstein does, that Nixonland `has not ended yet' is true but meaningless. Nixonland indeed exists, but not in the way Perlstein imagines. In fact it is the imaginary place where the 60s go to die. It is the remote magic mountain nursing home for those unable or unwilling to recover from the past, where the patients live in the twilight of a rapidly fading era. Most of the kids today don't visit the nursing home, except occasionally on grandpa's birthday, when he tells them stories of cities burning, John and Yoko in bed for peace, and `radical' philosophy be-ins, but leaves out the part where he took acid and ran half-naked in the streets before becoming a lawyer and moving to the suburbs. Nixonland is the same kind of invented place as John Ford's American West.
Had Nixon never become president, the arc of his career would have still held some interest for historians, but he hardly invented the Orthogonians versus Franklins (Perlstein's rhubric) conflict, a theme that has been salient throughout American history. Nixon was one player in the postwar drama, and a fascinating one, skilled at exploiting social rifts for political gain, but hardly the master metallurgist forging a new social alloy. The subtitle of the book includes the phrase, `the fracturing of America'. It's hard to know what that means, especially after reading the book. Fractures, fissures, social conflict (think FDR and his `moneyed interests'), and violence have marked American life for centuries, driving the social dynamic of the country. Nixon is one variant of the venal, cynical, manipulative, and corrupt American politician. In this he has keen competition, including among those who achieved the presidency.
The book repays reading and one should anticipate with enthusiasm a further installment where Perlstein will presumably draw out the picture of a fractured America.
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