Sorry about the lack of updates since Sunday….As it happens, encroaching November has frightened me into working harder on my US history orals site. My note-taking is still two months or so behind my reading, but – in case you’re interested – I’ve recently put up notes and reviews on the following books:
| John Morton Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974. William Leach, Land of Desire, Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. |
Updates to the orals site should come relatively frequently for the next few months, so expect more to come.
Kevin: Re: Reagan. I know you’re swamped in tomes, but how does Willis’ “constant lying” theory explain Reagan’s sudden political shift? While a case can be made for the relation between Reagan’s rise and the Gipper’s incredible speaking and storytelling skills (the most salient example being the infamous story about the woman collecting her welfare check in a Cadillac), it still doesn’t account for why he switched sides, or what specifically influenced him to switch sides. And I don’t believe that the lying, per se, was his sole appeal. Consider Reagan’s eleventh-hour standoff at the 1976 GOP convention, which illustrated the same obstinacy (an almost Randian individualism) that he later demonstrated to the air traffic controllers.