THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD

Newark Star-Ledger crime correspondent Kleinknecht (New Ethnic Mobs, 1996) turns a critical eye on the Reagan Revolution and its impact, still felt today.

The author makes a strong case that President Reagan’s policies of massive deregulation, free-market capitalism, budget cuts and trickle-down economics were nothing less than a dismantling of New Deal reforms and a disaster for the country, particularly its poorest citizens. There isn’t a lot of new information here, but Kleinknecht’s bare-knuckled journalistic prose makes this an engaging read. For example, rather than providing a set of statistics about the impact of Reagan’s economic policies on small-town America, the author shows how they affected the president’s hometown, Dixon, Ill., where the bus station closed, a residence for the mentally retarded was shuttered and a steel plant endured hard times. To illuminate the consequences of Reagan’s gutting of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Kleinknecht demonstrates that hundreds of children who died from Reye’s Syndrome could have been saved if the FDA had merely put warning labels on aspirin bottles. Depicting the human toll taken by the Reagan Revolution, the author eschews overt sentimentality and lets the stories speak for themselves. His criticism of deregulation is especially timely, given the current economic climate, and Kleinknecht uses these stories effectively to connect the Reagan legacy to a contemporary culture of self-interest and a Republican Party he views as mired in shallowness and ignorance. “With Reaganism has come an abandonment of all faith in reason and progress,” he writes, “and it has accrued manifestly to the detriment of the average American.”

Tough, well-argued criticism of a conservative icon.