A review by nbrown
Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72 by Rick Perlstein

4.0

Nixonland is an incredibly broad history of the 1960s. It's not really a Nixon biography, though it follows most of his life up until his resignation. Perlstein tries to find all of the events of the 60s and early 70s that brought us to today - and there's a lot. There are chapters that focus on the last weeks of Robert Kennedy's and Martin Luther King's lives, Southern strategy politics, Vietnam, the Kent State shootings (and campus protests and riots at other schools), and riots in major cities. It's densely packed with article excerpts and quotations and, while I learned a lot, I think there's too much focus on lateral events that don't get adequately tied back to Nixon and the shifts in the GOP.