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The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 | 
 enlarge | Author: Sean Wilentz
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 6598
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.6
ISBN: 0060744804
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.927
EAN: 9780060744809
ASIN: 0060744804
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
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Product Description
One of the nation's leading historians offers a groundbreaking and provocative chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon. The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the right has dominated American politics and government. In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz accounts for how a conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize power and hold it, and the momentous consequences that followed. Ronald Reagan has been the single most important political figure of this age. Without Reagan, the conservative movement would have never been as successful as it was. In his political persona as well as his policies, Reagan embodied a new fusion of deeply right-leaning politics with some of the rhetoric and even a bit of the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In American political history there have been a few leading figures who, for better or worse, have placed their political stamp indelibly on their times. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt—and Ronald Reagan. A conservative hero in a conservative age, Reagan has been so admired by a minority of historians and so disliked by the others that it has been difficult to evaluate his administration with detachment. Drawing on numerous primary documents that have been neglected or only recently released to the public, as well as on emerging historical work, Wilentz offers invaluable revelations about conservatism's ascendancy and the era in which Reagan was the preeminent political figure. Vivid, authoritative, and illuminating from start to finish, The Age of Reagan raises profound questions and opens passionate debate about our nation's recent past.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Wilenz is the Nigel Tufnel of historians - clueless and self-delusional. August 19, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A very funny book. My wife thought I was reading fiction (I was) because of the constant belly-laughing. I guess I never realized that all of Carter's failures were actually great successes and all of Reagan's successes were actually terrible failures. Amazing. Thank god for "intellectuals" telling us the facts (as interpreted by them). If you are looking for a good laugh rent Spinal Tap again. Otherwise avoid this diatribe at all costs.
 More campaign literature than history August 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Unfortunately this is a book which does a fine historian no credit. It is poorly written with many infelicitous lines but it has some value. Liberals and conservatives will both hate its nuanced appreciation of Reagan, a man of limited understanding but some firm beliefs which turned sometimes in a dangerous direction and finally in a beneficent one.
The book recalls for many of us, both those who voted for Reagan and those appalled by his election, why he won two national races for the presidency: it was a reaction to the disintegration of the old Democratic Party caused by Vietnam and the destruction of the Solid Democratic South by the black uprising some call the Civil Rights movement. The fear of the black underclass motivated many to trust the rightwing Republicans for the first time and this fear continues today with the appearance of Obama as a possible president. McCain may win for the same reasons as Reagan. Obama benefitted from the Civil Rights Movement as did his wife but most blacks are no better off than before the end of segregation. Indeed many were better off on the Southern plantations.
Wilentz is a liberal Democrat but he has a good sense of where Reagan properly responded to what Americans really wanted and needed. His analysis is fair and balanced, certainly more so than Fox News' contributions. Wilentz has a good handle on the reasons why Bush 43 is a disaster, the worst president since James Buchanan and perhaps even worse than Buchanan. His sympathy for Bill Clinton does not conceal the real weaknesses and deficiencies of Clinton, both personal and political.
But in the last analysis this book has been gotten up for the 2008 election and it will not stand as any kind of permanent resource in our political history. Wilentz has missed the boat here, I fear.
Don't bother...it's predictable August 13, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you are looking for an objective history of the Reagan Administration, look elsewhere. This guy lists himself as a Pulitzer finalist...well, I hope hope he doesn't expect to win anytime soon. Politically, he's a teacher at Princeton -- enough said. The book is predictable, almost elementary.
In the introduction, Wilentz brags that he didn't conduct any interviews because it would have taken too much time. The end result is as expected. Ronald Reagan is the bogeyman. The most popular president of my lifetime only gets credit for Iran-Contra. Meanwhile, Wilentz's beloved Democrats manage to overcome despite Ronald Reagan. It reminds me of the old New York City party joke: How did Reagan win? no one I know voted for him. I suspect none of Wilentz' friends voted for him either.
Wilentz is entitled to his opinion, But please don't pass it off as fact.
Then there'd the writing. I was taught that adjectives were cheap. Well, Wilentz is the master if the ham-handed adjective. Every Republican is "mean-spirited" while every Democrats is courageous or (at the time) misunderstood.
If you are looking for a predictable "Princeton" editorial of the Reagan Era era, this the book for you. If you want to be enlightened and learn something, I suggest look elsewhere.
Don't' buy this book, you can have mine-- not that I want I want the dis-information to spread. Wilentz doesn't want to waste his energy conducting interviews -- don't waste your energy reading it.
Waste of Time and Money August 10, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Sean Wilentz is an awoved Marxist with a long track record of writing tendentious leftist history -all hailed as magisterial by his fellow leftist academics. For anyone willing to do their own reading and be their own critic, the bias and political agenda in his work is plain to see.
Take a few minutes, if you can, before buying this one to read the preface. The outrageously absurd comments on President Bush and the Republican Party generally tell you all you need to know about Wilentz's perspective, his political agenda and his reasons for writing this book - and his competence as well. Anyone who seriously believes the nonsense he spouts there shouldn't be writing history - he shows a total lack of the ability to read objectively, weigh sources and penetrate beneath the slogans to the reality.
If you really want to understand Reagan, try something by Steve Hayward.
Biased vitriol as history August 9, 2008
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
In "The Age of Reagan" by Sean Wilentz, an ultra-liberal professor and commentator for the liberal magazine, "The New Republic" one can see that Wilentz grudgingly admires aspects of Ronald Reagan's presidency. He admits in his introduction that he is "...sharply critical of Reagan's leadership..." but that "...Reagan and his presidency were so important that they deserve more scholarly attention than they have received." So, Wilentz sets off to give Reagan, and the years from 1974 to 2008, some serious attention, but not the sort that Reagan, or his many admirers, would much appreciate.
First of all, Wilentz's bias is hard to miss. Every conservative is either "extremist," "hard-line," or "ultra." Republicans are described as "hotspurs," "right-wing," or "hard right." Liberal Democrats are just regular folks, of course. It got rather tiring fairly quickly. Anytime a pejorative adjective was used in the book, supposedly a history, the reader would immediately know that Wilentz was about to name a Republican. I almost wore out my pen underlining the instances.
One of Wilentz's worst non sequiturs appeared in a chapter on President George W. Bush when he links global warming warnings to hurricane Katrina, "Bush, who had long ignored scientists' warnings about the meteorological effects of global warming, sloughed off warnings from the Director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit." Wilentz, a non-scientist, appears to be ignorant of the fact that most weather scientists say global warming actually weakens hurricanes because of greater wind shear that tears the storms apart as they approach North America.
After slogging through more than 450 pages of left wing invective, the reader comes to a small acknowledgement of the positive achievements of Ronald Reagan, "The age of Reagan had by then lasted longer than most other such periods in our political history... If it fell far short of eradicating Franklin Roosevelt's revolution in government or the reforms of the 1960s, it dramatically changed the sum and substance of American politics. It also hastened the downfall of the Soviet empire through Reagan's diplomatic engagement with Mikhail Gorbachev, without a single nuclear weapon being fired in anger." Note, that even in this last acknowledgement, Wilentz attributes the "hastened the downfall of the Soviet empire" through "diplomatic engagement" not the military buildup which he, as a liberal, no doubt opposed strenuously.
Reviewer: Chuck DeVore is a California State Assemblyman, he served as a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Department of Defense from 1986 to 1988, retired from the Army National Guard as a lieutenant colonel, and is the co-author of "China Attacks."
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