Reviews

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein

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tsharris's review

5.0

This is an amazing piece of work. While at times it seems as if Perlstein was just accumulating detail for its own sake, he actually manages to weave a convincing narrative of how the Republican Party shifted to the right in the wake of Watergate while telling the story of Ronald Reagan as both an instigator and a beneficiary of that shift. He successfully embeds the story of American conservatism in the broader story of American anxiety in the mid-1970s, drawing on a wide range of sources to illustrate how the anxious mood was manifest. And, again and again, he hammers home what has been the thesis of all of his books on the transformation of the American right: liberal elites repeatedly underestimated or misunderstood the mood on the right and in the nation at large. I take his point, although I'm not quite sure what he's getting at - what would have been different had coastal elites taken Reagan more seriously? Given that Perlstein implies that the rightward shift was the product of deep-seated social forces and not simply the result of strategic decisions by actors like Reagan, I don't see what difference it would have made had liberals been more attuned to the national mood. Still, I cannot describe this book as anything other than compulsively readable.

noahbw's review

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4.0

So this book is REALLY long. But, Perlstien does really effectively transport us back in time through his voluminous description of culture. Almost everything in here I learned for the first time.