Richard Nixon Election poster (1968)
As of 2020, Perlstein had published four notable books on the subject of modern American conservatism.
Before the Storm (2001)
In 1997, Perlstein began work on a history of the rise of Barry Goldwater, a transformative event for the conservative movement. Perlstein’s book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, was released in 2001 to widespread acclaim, including a laudatory New York Times review by William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. Kristol wrote of Before the Storm, “It’s an amazing story, and Perlstein, a man of the left, does it justice.”[17] Perlstein won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.[18] Soon after, Perlstein moved from New York to Chicago. From 2003 to 2005, Perlstein was the Village Voice‘s national political correspondent, and contributed articles to publications that included the New York Times, The New Republic and The American Prospect.
Beginning in spring 2007 through 2009 Perlstein was a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future where he wrote for its blog The Big Con about the failures of conservative governance. A co-director at the Campaign for America’s Future once noted, “Rick was unique. … I don’t know when he sleeps.”[19][20][21]
Nixonland (2008)
Main article: Nixonland
In May 2008, Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America was published to rave reviews.[22][23][24][25][26][27] In his review, the conservative columnist George Will credited Perlstein having “a novelist’s, or perhaps an anthropologist’s, eye for illuminating details” and called Nixonland “compulsively readable.”[28] At the end of 2008, The New York Times included Nixonland among its notable books.[29] In 2009, The A.V. Club included it among the best books of the decade.[30]
The Invisible Bridge (2014)
In August 2014, Simon & Schuster published The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote that the tome was “a Rosetta stone for reading America and its politics today.”[31] The Invisible Bridge received favorable reviews from The New Yorker, Slate, and The Washington Post among others.
Reaganland (2020)
In August 2020, Perlstein published a fourth work detailing the events of the years before Ronald Reagan‘s presidency and his presidential race against Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980.[32] Reaganland is Perlstein’s longest publication at almost 1,200 pages long.
Reaganland received favorable reviews from The Guardian,[33] the Los Angeles Times,[34] and The New Republic.[35] Reaganland was one of the New York Times 100 Notables Books of 2020.[36] It was also subject to a scathing critique in Commentary by Steven F. Hayward, himself an author of a two-part volume on Reagan.[37]
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