Showcases innovative approaches to the major—mostly domestic—events of the recent American past, while providing ample historical grounding for comprehending the nation's current state of division and despair ... Kruse and Zelizer write their eminently readable book in a single, clear voice -- no easy task for joint authors ... at times reads like a textbook. But its timeliness and valuable insights will ensure that it will receive a wide readership outside of upper-level college history courses ... Kruse and Zelizer reject polemics and heated language in favor of a prose style that is judicious and fair, and at times, overly anodyne.
Fault Lines started as a series of lectures by Kruse and Zelizer offered at Princeton. Judging from the resulting book, the class was no doubt a wonderful introduction to a critical era in our history. Even for those who lived through these events, Fault Lines gives brilliant context to help us understand how Americans have become so fragmented and rigid in our beliefs.
Doesn’t accomplish their goal. They recount lots of the headline-making events, but their narrative tells us only that Americans became increasingly divided and embittered, not why they did. History, and especially narrowly political history of the kind presented here, is not equipped to answer the question they put to it. Political controversies are mainly the manifestations of warring preconceptions and worldviews long in the making. Examining the controversies by themselves won’t tell you much about their origins or meaning ... One expects academic historians to lean leftward in their judgments...But Messrs. Kruse and Zelizer present themselves as uncommitted, objective historians even as they portray one dispute after another as if it were largely or wholly the result of the stupidity, bigotry or arrogance of Republican officeholders and their allies ... Messrs. Kruse and Zelizer miss perhaps the most relevant fault line of our time: the line between disdainful elites who equate reality with their own interpretations and everybody else.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
