Still, anyone who has not already read this essential history of the Nixonization of America, and especially anyone who did...
In its hardcover format, Nixonland succeeded in telling the complicated story of the 1960s partly through a deft use of narration based on the medium most Americans relied on in that turbulent decade: network TV news reports. This enhanced e-book version replaces the photos illustrating the book with more than 30 contemporary video clips scattered throughout, all made available by CBS News.
The videos, few longer than two minutes and most considerably shorter, cover race riots, anti-war demonstrations, assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, presidential speeches to the nation and so on. Some of these replace and augment the coverage in Perlstein’s book based on NBC or ABC reports. Others, which Perlstein described in the text, are illuminating: for example, a segment on Stokely Carmichael’s introduction of the establishment-quaking phrase “black power” to the national discussion during an angry demonstration in Mississippi, and Walter Cronkite’s meticulous detailing of what was then known of the Watergate scandal, before Watergate had even become a household word. Despite Perlstein’s claim to CBS News’ Bob Schieffer, in a video introduction to these media enhancements, that these clips “complete” the book, a hard-copy reader of Nixonland probably would not lose much, if anything, from skipping this enhanced version.
Still, anyone who has not already read this essential history of the Nixonization of America, and especially anyone who did not live through the era, would do well to dig into this meaty book in this multimedia format.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0626-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
A brief but thoughtful essay outlining the terrible misapprehensions that led to escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union from the close of WW I to the end of the Korean conflict. Although anti-Bolshevik feelings ran high even at the time of the Russian Revolution, fear of the USSR didn't dominate American foreign policy until after WW II. Drawing on materials newly available from Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives, Leffler (winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power) deftly traces the history of US-Soviet relations in prÇcis, from the Bolsheviks' rise to power through the uneasy truce in Korea. Begining as an ideological clash, the tension between the two nations only gradually became a power struggle as well. Indeed, it was only when the USSR became a player on the same global scale as the US (albeit considerably weaker in key strategic areas after the pounding it took during WW II) that the Soviets were perceived as an active threat abroad. On the other hand, seen through the distorting mirror of obsessive anti-Communism, domestic American radicals were regarded as a danger almost from the first murmur of the word ``Bolshevik'' in the popular press, and it was the specter of homegrown subversion rather than foreign invasion that haunted American policies for a long time. Leffler retells this often familiar material methodically, using the new documentation to reveal Stalin as hesitant and tentative in foreign policy, primarily concerned with erecting a security buffer around Russia rather than building an evil empire. The portrait that emerges is of two superpowers-in-formation engaged in a grim dialogue of the deaf, with terrible consequences for humanity. Although much of the ground covered is well trod, this is an admirably complete introduction to the history of the Cold War.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8090-8791-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Grounding his story in documentary and fragmentary archaeological evidence, British archaeologist Hume (Martin's Hundred, 1982) tantalizingly reconstructs the history of the earliest English settlements in America. The British drive for colonies grew out of England's 16th- century rivalry with Spain; hence the earliest English settlements in America were planted in the midst of the ``Terra Florida'' that explorers had claimed for the Spanish crown. After some abortive attempts to create an English foothold in the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh sent more than 100 English colonists under gentleman-artist John White to lay claim to the land the Elizabethans called ``Virginia.'' They landed in Roanoke, in what is now North Carolina, in July 1587. After establishing a fort and colony, White and some members of the group returned to England. When several more English ships arrived in Roanoke in 1589, the colony had vanished with few, cryptic traces. Hume painstakingly reviews the sparse evidence, both from contemporary journals and from modern forays over the site, of the Lost Colony: Almost surely, the settlers were massacred by Indians, although little evidence exists today either of their presence at Roanoke or of their fate. Similarly, Hume tracks the more successful but often tragic history of the Jamestown settlement from its birth in 1607, using artifacts and journals of the period to trace the colony's growth from its unpromising beginning as a small disease-ridden group of adventurers into a prosperous community. Hume focuses particularly on the relationship between the settlers and the Indians, which went from mutual idealization to demonization within a few years. This culminated in the 1622 slaughter by the Indian chief Opechancanough of English settlers in the area around Jamestown and an English backlash against the natives that spelled the ultimate doom of their culture. Hume breaks little novel historical ground, although he eloquently recounts the archaeological record and brings alive the lost settlements of the early American past with wit and style. (164 illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-56446-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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