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    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008
    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008
    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008
    Audiobook23 hours

    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008

    Written by Sean Wilentz

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz offers a fresh, brilliant chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon. The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the Right has dominated American politics and government. Wilentz accounts for how an extreme conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize power and hold it, and the momentous consequences that followed.

    Ronald Reagan has been the single most important political figure of this age. Without Reagan, the conservative movement would never have been as successful as it was. In his political persona, as well as his policies, Reagan embodied a new fusion of deeply right-leaning politics with some of the rhetoric and even the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In American political history, there have been a few figures who, for better or worse, have placed their political stamp indelibly on their times. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt-and Ronald Reagan. A conservative hero in a conservative age, Reagan is either so admired by a minority of historians or so disliked by the others that it has been difficult to evaluate his administration with detachment. The Age of Reagan raises profound questions and opens passionate debate about our nation's recent past.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 30, 2008
    ISBN9781400177585
    The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008
    Author

    Sean Wilentz

    Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of several books, including Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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    Reviews for The Age of Reagan

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      An excellent chronicle of events that's marred, not by Wilentz's take on Reagan, which is as positive as any objective viewer could wish, but by his defense of Clinton, whose various actual misdeeds are buried in the narrative of Republican lunacy that focused on his penis instead of his politics. Another goodreads reviewer has suggested, disapprovingly, that "this book is intended for students of political history, but clearly not for republicans." Well, yes.

      It's usually a good sign when a book about recent American politics is attacked from both sides, and that's the case here. Wilentz debunks the Reagan mythologies (i.e., Reagan did not swoop down like Superman to end World Communism; nor was he an idiot who just bumbled his way through the presidency with notes on the back of napkins), and puts in their place a reasonable argument: that Reagan's real achievement was resisting the realists in his administration, which made Gorbachev's actions in the USSR possible. Wilentz goes so far as to suggest that this is one of the greatest accomplishments of any US president, ever. Republicans, apparently, don't like to hear that kind of thing.

      On the other hand, what could have been an excellent short study in the business of the press after Watergate--the muckraking mentality, Wilentz suggests, made politics less doable through the eighties and nineties--turns instead into a defense of Clinton. His actual, important policy decisions, his 'third way' of politics (according to which the polls rule, rather than reason), and his genuine foreign policy mistakes are all given little play; instead, Wilentz suggests that the real story is how Clinton was almost brought down by a smaller but still considerable right wing conspiracy that was only possible because of the prurience and incompetence of the press. Very disappointing.

      But not as disappointing as subtitling a book "A History, 1974-2008" and then including only an epilogue on the last 8 years of that period. Perhaps he felt he just couldn't deal objectively with Bush II, but in that case, what's wrong with 'A History, 1974-2000'?

      In any case, all the big scandals and stories are here, and Wilentz writes quite well, so it's a pleasure to read (and not, thankfully, in the way that journalistic accounts are a pleasure to read. Wilentz doesn't need to use the present tense to make his account seem important).