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Title: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein ISBN: 0-8090-2858-1 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: 15 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (23 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tremendous reporting, masterful writing
Comment: In my experience, it's rare to find a book that features both thorough, impeccable reporting (primary sources, no less) and wonderfully skilled writing. "Before the Storm" is that rare book. I have read it through twice in the two years that I've owned it, and I enjoyed it even more the second time. As a 45-year-old liberal, I harbor little memory and no nostalgia for Mr. Goldwater. Though I enjoy reading political nonfiction, I would not have expected to enjoy a book about a long-ago, lopsided presidential race featuring a right-wing extremist as the Republican candidate. But a New Yorker book review intrigued me, so I checked out the book.
It is the finest book I have read in the past two years. As others have said, readers from all points on the political spectrum will find "Before the Storm" interesting. Why not? A great book transcends narrow labels. I would read anything Rick Perlstein writes, and I anxiously await his next work, whatever it may be.
Rating: 5
Summary: Politics and the '60s
Comment: You don't have to be a political junkie to enjoy Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm - the ultimately quixotic tale of the 1964 nominating fight and presidential campaign of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. A product of exhaustive research (the Notes and Bibliography alone stretch for nearly 120 pages), Before the Storm transports the reader to the very heart of the '60s where the Cold War and the Vietnam conflict loom large, the assassination of JFK shocks the nation, the Civil Rights movement and college unrest define a generation - and a band of conservative activists establishes a public policy agenda which, though mightily rejected in the 1964 election of Lyndon Johnson, bears surprising fruit a scant two years later in the election of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California.
If you are a fledgling activist, Before the Storm will usher you into the realities of the American political process where politics is war, even the most minute organizational details matter, and all things are ultimately possible.
If you are a student of American history, Before the Storm will bring new life to the story of the '60s for you with real people, real ideas and terribly real events pushing and shoving you in every imaginable direction. After reading Before the Storm you will never view the '60s with simple, rose-colored glasses again.
If you are a child of the '60s, Before the Storm will bring back your youth in bold strokes and striking colors. Whether you see yourself as conservative or liberal, you will feel once again the siren call of human freedom that so clearly marked that generation of Civil Rights Workers and Young Americans for Freedom.
Reading Before the Storm will help make you a more astute observer of the political scene - chuckling to yourself over the apocalyptic mutterings of big-time pundits like Scotty Reston, Tom Wicker and Walter Lippmann forty years ago even as you develop a healthy mistrust of the the McLaughlins, Blitzers and Dowds of today.
And if you are an admirer of Barry Goldwater, as I was, Before the Storm will upset you with his Keystone Cops campaign (after winning the nomination) and the bull headedness of your hero. In the end you will appreciate Goldwater for what he truly was - an uncompromising advocate of freedom whose integrity, loyalty and conviction were unquestioned by friend and foe alike.
Rating: 2
Summary: An important story marred by poor writing
Comment: Goldwater's disastorous 1964 Presidential campaign is the vehicle for telling the book's real story: the rise of the ultra-conservative movement in American politics in the sixties. It is undoubtedly an important story, and one that Perlstein has researched considerably. However, Perlstein's work is undone not by his findings, or his damaging portrayal of the burgeoning right-wing movement -- I concur with him on these points -- but by very lazy presentation. Perlstein has obvioulsy drunk deep at the David Halberstam well. He can rattle off an anecdote, but he is dreadfully prolix. The book is at least two hundred pages too long. No reader opening a book on sixties politics needs an eight-hundred word summary of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Perlstein has also made a mess in organising his material; he leaps back and forth, from person to person, without ever stitching the requisite parts together. One moment Henry Cabot Lodge looks to be the certain favourite for the 1964 Republican nomination, and we are treated to fifteen pages on the organisation of his campaign; later we are told, almost as an aside, that he has withdrawn from the race, and Perlstein never explains why. Sam Tannehaus's 'Whittaker Chambers' is a much more assured analysis of the growth of anti-communist hysteria in the fifties and sixites, and is considerably shorter and better crafted than Perlstein's book. A more thorough editor and an author more intent on telling the story carefully and well would have made 'Before the Storm' a much better book than it is.
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Title: The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by George H. Nash ISBN: 188292620X Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Inst Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Suburban Warriors : The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr ISBN: 0691096112 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 21 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism by Jonathan M. Schoenwald ISBN: 0195157265 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice by Lee Cokorinos ISBN: 0742524760 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power by Lou Cannon ISBN: 1586480308 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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