![]() ![]() It is a contention not easily dismissed, but many readers will appreciate that there is nothing new about America’s polarized politics (or culture). Perlstein’s overarching thesis, tying together two parallel narratives involving American society and Nixon himself, is that Richard Nixon masterfully recognized, exploited and magnified cultural divisions which then persisted long past his presidency. ![]() Divided into four broad sections (corresponding to the national elections in 1966, 1968, 19) this book explores social trends and unrest deriving largely from Vietnam and racial tensions. Readers will quickly discover that “Nixonland” is more a cultural and social history of the United States than a biography of Nixon. ![]() Perlstein is currently working on a fourth book in this series on America’s political and social fabric. Perlstein’s most recent book “ The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” picks up where “Nixonland” ends. His first book “ Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” explores American culture in the 1960s. Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein’s widely-praised “ Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” was published in 2008. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() In a fury, she lashes out at her daughter's beauty and then retreats into outraged silence. Amy withdraws, too, and mother and daughter eat, sleep, and even work side by side but remain at a vast, seemingly unbridgeable distance from each other. This conflict is surrounded by other large and small dramas in the town of Shirley Falls: a teenage pregnancy, a UFO sighting, a missing child, and the trials of Fat Bev, the community's enormous (and enormously funny and compassionate) peacemaker and amateur medical consultant. Keeping Isabelle and Amy as the main focus of her sharp, sympathetic eye, Elizabeth Strout attends to them all. As she does so, she reveals not only her deep affection for her characters, both serious and comic, but her profound wisdom about the human condition in general. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. “One of the year’s most ingenious and eye-opening cultural studies.” - Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2022 ![]() ![]() ![]() Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, also addresses how to put an end to it. ![]() I talked to Anderson, who wrote an entire book about white rage, about its meaning and how it has historically operated in America. It is predicated on a sense that only whites are legitimate Americans,” Anderson told me. It is the fear of a multicultural democracy. “White rage is the operational function of white supremacy. It is the rage that fueled the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to dismantle America’s multicultural democracy - and it hasn’t gone away. It lives in criminal sentencing laws and plays out in a war on drugs that was waged against Black people. It lives in voter ID laws and manifests in the Black votes that are never cast. According to Anderson, white rage is legitimatized through the policies that make up the American political framework. ![]() |