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Rachel Maddow
Rave The New York Times Book Review Maddow focuses on the eve of World War II, when homegrown fascists sought to create an American Reich ... A ripping read — well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same punch and assurance that she brings to a broadcast. Perhaps, at times, too much punch: Her writing often tends toward the knowing wisecrack, the elbow in the ribs ... Valuable.
Heather Cox Richardson
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Panoramic ... The resulting book is odd and unfocused. It is structured, in effect, as three pocket histories ... Yet as a diagnosis of what ails America, the conflation of hierarchy and autocracy goes only so far.
Timothy Egan
Positive The New York Times Book Review Powerful ... Egan...writes with brisk authority and an eye for the vivid, and unsettling, detail. There are many in this book, which reads at times like a screenplay for a crime procedural, at others like a horror film ... There is a sureness to Egan’s storytelling as he moves from scene to scene ... A Fever in the Heartland is gripping; as a rumination on the moral obscenity of white supremacy — whatever guises it wears — the book is damning ... Yet it goes too far in its central contention: that Oberholtzer, as the subtitle declares, \'stopped\' the Klan before it could \'take over America\' ... Egan’s book tells some of their stories, but in elevating one above the rest, it underplays what had come to constitute, loosely but effectively, a countermovement. The blow that Madge Oberholtzer struck against violence and depravity is no less heroic for the fact that others struck their own.
Jefferson Cowie
Rave The New York Times Book Review Powerful and subering ... Important, deeply affecting — and regrettably relevant ... Though Cowie keeps his focus on the past, his book sheds stark light on the present. It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government ... White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered.
Irwin F Gellman
Pan The New York Times Book Review Gellman has, arguably, logged more hours and examined more documents in the Nixon archives than any other historian to date. That doggedness, he says, has yielded new information and insights into the events of 1960. There is much ballyhooing in this book of its author’s willingness to follow facts wherever they lead ... What is surprising about this buildup — this raising of stakes and throwing down of gauntlets — is that Campaign of the Century is largely a conventional, Nixon-friendly take on the race. Books of this kind are fewer, to be sure, than books by Kennedy partisans, but Gellman’s is hardly alone on the shelf ... Gellman’s thumb is firmly on the scales — or in Kennedy’s eye. From the book’s first pages, Kennedy is cynical and callow, the unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father. Gellman is at pains to establish that Kennedy was not a family man but a philanderer, that he was not in fine health but was hobbled by Addison’s disease and back problems ... As a political narrative, Campaign of the Century is strangely lacking in both politics and narrative. It dutifully records the clashes of candidates but offers little context for their disagreements... Gellman places his man in the middle, but gives no sense of whether this moderation was ideological or tactical. All is left a muddle while the author sprints off in pursuit of historians who have overhyped Kennedy’s performance in the televised debates ... the white whale here is proof of a stolen election. This book does not provide it. The case it puts forward is circumstantial — and nothing new.
Neal Gabler
Positive The New York Times Book Review Kennedy’s expansive life has yielded no shortage of biographies, but Gabler’s is on its way toward becoming the most complete and ambitious. As a character study it is rich and insightful, frank in its judgments but deeply sympathetic to the man Gabler regards as \'the most complex of the Kennedys\' ... Catching the Wind lends a cinematic sweep to Kennedy’s legislative crusades ... Gabler makes these battles exciting, though at times he seems intent on making everything exciting; scenes are often over-egged, amped up by incantation ... The reader needs no such prodding; the drama, as it develops, is real enough ... Kennedy, for his part, felt the winds shifting ... As Gabler’s next volume will no doubt describe, Kennedy’s response was not to change course. He would simply sail harder.
Julian E Zelizer
Positive The Washington Post Zelizer is not the first to suggest that Gingrich \'broke politics,\' as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, but his book provides an engaging, unsettling and, alas, timely look at the torch that Gingrich took to our system of self-government ... Many readers will know how the story ends, but Zelizer tells it with authority, investing it with tension as Gingrich conjures the storm and wrecks, perhaps permanently, the political landscape.
Joseph J. Ellis
Positive The New York Times Book Review Ellis ... writes with insight and acuity in the present tense, just as he always has in the past tense, and in American Dialogue he draws connections between our history and our present reality with an authority that few other authors can muster. It may cost him some of his readership on the right, but Ellis, clearly, has reached the limit of his tolerance for the mythical, indeed farcical, notion that the anti-Federalists won the argument in the late 18th century, or that the founders, to a man, stood for small and weak government, unrestrained market capitalism, unfettered gun ownership and the unlimited infusion of money into the political sphere.
Lawrence O'Donnell
Positive The New York Times Book Review The election of 1968 decided one thing: that Richard M. Nixon and not Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey would become president. It left nearly everything else unresolved ... Lawrence O’Donnell, the host of a political talk show on MSNBC, tells that story with zeal in Playing With Fire ... knows how to pace a story, and could not have dreamed up a more compelling cast of characters ...moves briskly and ably through these candidacies, their collisions and a dark bacchanal of events that still defies belief... O’Donnell’s own observations frequently recall the tossed-off hyperboles of cable news ... This is the voice of the pundit, and in a work of history it sounds jarring — all the more so when it’s discussing Donald Trump, as O’Donnell does repeatedly.
Richard Aldous
Positive The Washington Post Schlesinger is not quite a full treatment: The book has much less to say about his scholarship, despite its enduring influence, than his 'near addiction to the narcotic of political battle,' as Aldous puts it, and devotes fewer than 30 pages to the last four decades of his life, productive though they were. That aside, it is a convincing portrait, rendered with skill and sensitivity, sympathetic toward its subject while capturing the quirks that made him, in the words of one contemporary, 'so Arthurish.'
Mark Thompson
Rave The Washinton Post ..this insightful book is focused less on Trump himself than on the conditions that sustain him — and on what, if anything, can be done to reverse them ... Enough Said displays many of the qualities that it identifies as lacking in our civic discourse. It is thoughtful, nuanced and wise; it considers opposing views; it takes ample note of history and is unafraid of complexity. To read this book is to feel there is cause, however tenuous, for hope.
Michael J. Graetz & Linda Greenhouse
Positive The New York Times Book Review If the 'theme' of the Warren court was equality before the law, they contend, then under Burger, 'equality took a back seat to other values: to the prerogatives of states and localities...to the efficiency of the criminal justice system, to the interests of business and, above all, to rolling back the rights' that the court, in the 1950s and 1960s, had granted to the poor and the powerless. This is the case the authors make — with clarity, authority and evident passion — identifying the principles at stake and the costs, as they see it, of the Burger retrenchment. The book provides a powerful corrective to the standard narrative of the Burger court — and should change the way that period is perceived ... the Burger court effectively ended judicial oversight of plea bargaining and sentencing, leaving both in the hands of prosecutors and state legislatures, neither of which are known for restraint. While not equally persuasive across all areas of law, the book establishes a similar pattern in cases concerning race, the separation of church and state, employment discrimination and other issues: on the surface, moderation; underneath, and in the aggregate, an erosion of fundamental rights ... Graetz and Greenhouse acknowledge that women’s rights, including reproductive rights, appear a 'glaring exception' to the Burger court’s conservatism.