Dave

Interestingly, Nixonland isn't a biography of Richard Nixon but instead more a history of the 1960s in America with Richard Nixon as the main character. Perlstein tells the story of the political, social, and cultural history of the U.S. in the '60s in very entertaining fashion, jumping from historical event to historical event with very satisfying in-depth analysis and exploration. Perlstein's most valuable contribution is his ability to see past the surface of historical actors' words and analyze their rhetoric and ideology with a precise clarity. Nixon becomes the perfect protagonist for such analysis because, as Perlstein makes clear, he was a master of politics and language and controlling the conversation. Nixon chose his public words very carefully, always making sure that the American public saw the version of himself (a down-to-Earth outsider who understood their frustrations, grievances, and resentments) that he wanted them to see. His actions were carefully taken as well. Nixon was able to craft coalitions with elements of the right that suited him when he needed, be they far-right John Birchers and Southern Segregationists, or moderate liberal Republicans like those who were likely to support George Romney or Nelson Rockefeller.

Perlstein believes that the present day culture wars and sociopolitical divides trace their origins to the mid 1960s and that Richard Nixon was the soothsayer who identified them first and was able to exploit them to his benefit, ultimately winning him the presidency. I do believe that the general reactionary right wing / progressive left wing cultural dispute probably is older than suggested here, but Perlstein is able to present evidence from every single part of American society (electoral politics, mass pop culture, academia, student organizing, housing, literature, military, labor) to demonstrate how this divide grew to become a great chasm in the 1960s.

In Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria, Jr., over the course of 11 essays, explores the relationship between Native Americans and different institutions in the United States. The relationship between Native Americans and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, between Native Americans and Black people, between Native Americans and anthropologists, between Native Americans and missionaries and the Christian establishment, between Native Americans and the treaties that have been imposed upon them. The essays can be vicious, self-deprecating, tragic, hilarious, deeply reasoned, eye-opening, but they are always extremely lucid and offer necessary perspective. There are elements of the book that don't age perfectly well: Deloria has grievances with the civil rights movement which at times can seem overly fastidious, and in particular he seems specifically very upset with the failure of Martin Luther King's Poor People's March, which had failed in the spring of the year he was writing (and in the immediate aftermath of King's assassination), and these issues seem less important with 60 years of hindsight as I write this. Additionally, women's issues are almost entirely absent which I imagine some contemporary observers might take issue with. These issues aside, the work clearly comes from a very sharp with who was writing in a way that was all but totally new and totally necessary.

Nice overview of the history of the underrated supervillain of German cinema, Dr. Mabuse. Covers the 12 or so movies that have featured Dr. Mabuse including concise but interesting biographies of the respective directors, summaries of their plots, histories of their productions, analysis of their themes, and relevant contextual placement within German and filmic culture as well as in relation to each other.

Seems to me this was written in large part to counter the arguments of Kracauer's notorious 1947 “From Caligari to Hitler” which argued that the prewar German movies, including the expressionist films, presaged Hitler and represented a traceable trajectory in the German mindset. Eisner instead spends most of this book talking about what Expressionism wasn't, as overly simplistic generalizations have been quick to call every German film “expressionist”. The book starts with more immediacy than it finishes but it does a good job of laying out the influence of German Romanticism, the theater of Max Reinhardt, and of the small stable of competent German filmmakers on one another.

The Saltwater Frontier is a very admirably written piece of history. Andrew Lipman presents a history of the geopolitical situation in New Netherlands and New England in the 17th century, and in a surprising breakthrough which rightfully won him the prestigious Bancroft Prize, actually made use of BOTH Dutch and English primary sources to do his research. As such Lipman is actually able to triangulate and include the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the area as well. All told, the book, with its spectacular prose, gives a vivid picture of what life on the ground (and on the sea) might have been like in 1640s Connecticut. In a relatively short 300 or so pages Lipman opens the readers eyes to the ways that the waters of the American northeast functioned themselves as a frontier that were often dominated by the indigenous peoples of the area.