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A review by barkingstars
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
5.0
It's not often a political biography can be called a page turner but this definitely can. It remains so gripping by bypassing stats and eye watering legal debates in favour of those key details that paint a vivid picture of its characters. Throughout there are details about the culture of the period, all to ensure that we don't just know that people voted for Nixon but perhaps why they voted for Nixon.
Nixon once supposedly said that when he looked in the mirror he saw no one there. In this book Nixon is simultaneously a man of basic motivations and yet also enigmatic. Eventually all that mendacity makes him mysterious. Will you understand him any better at the end of this book? Perhaps not. But then the real mystery is why people voted for him - and that becomes a lot clearer. Ultimately this is a horror story, telling us how Nixon may have ended in political disgrace but probably did more to form the future of American politics than anyone else.
Nixon once supposedly said that when he looked in the mirror he saw no one there. In this book Nixon is simultaneously a man of basic motivations and yet also enigmatic. Eventually all that mendacity makes him mysterious. Will you understand him any better at the end of this book? Perhaps not. But then the real mystery is why people voted for him - and that becomes a lot clearer. Ultimately this is a horror story, telling us how Nixon may have ended in political disgrace but probably did more to form the future of American politics than anyone else.