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Before the Storm : Barry Goldwater and the Unmasking of the American Consensus

About the Author

Rick Perlstein is the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. His reviews, reporting, and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Observer, New Republic, Washington Post, London Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago. www.rickperlstein.org

Reviews

"Combining prodigious research with journalistic flair, Rick Perlstein. . .has produced a detailed and dramatic narrative of the rise of the modern right...It's an amazing story, and Perlstein, a man of the left, does it justice."--William Kristol, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Daring, virtuosic writing, and encyclopedic mastery make . . . [Before the Storm] one of the most stylish, riveting achievements in narrative history to appear in years . . . An exciting volume, an outstanding debut. It goes beyond conservatism. It ups the ante on what popular history can, and should, do."--Mark Greif, "The Village Voice"

Jon Margolis titled his lively rendering of 1964 The Last Innocent Year (LJ 2/1/99). In this masterly account of the 1964 election, in which President Johnson trounced Republican Barry Goldwater, Perlstein, a writer for Slate and the Nation, shows that Johnson's victory was pyrrhic and that the year was anything but innocent. The post-World War II consensus became unraveled in 1964 by Mississippi bombings, Berkeley student uprisings, Communists supposedly lurking everywhere, the first of several long hot summers of urban racial violence, and what Johnson called that "bitch of a war" starting to foment in Vietnam. Perlstein re-creates these events in detailed, lucid narratives that include captivating exposs of the Young Americans for Freedom, and the 1964 contenders for the Republican presidential nomination- Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, and Henry Cabot Lodge. From the ashes of Goldwater's inept campaign and Johnson's short-lived victory arose the modern conservative Republican party, which saw its champion, Ronald Reagan, propelled to the White House in 1980. Mathew Dalleck's The Right Moment is a solid account of Reagan's rise, but this investigation of the birth of modern conservatism, written with the same verve as Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud That Shaped a Decade (LJ 9/15/97), is in a class by itself. Highly recommended for all libraries. Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.