I’ve been a big fan of Jimmy Carter all my life, but Perlstein’s account of his Presidency has forced me to rethink much of that. He’s not the only one who comes off badly. Yes, he was a great storyteller, but as it turns out many of the stories he told, even about himself, were badly remembered or simply made up.

His intellectual grasp of issues was limited, and his view of the world was simplistic and schematic. It’s hard to take him seriously as a hero, politician, or President after reading it. Ronald Reagan doesn’t come off well in this book, to put it mildly. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives' cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later. Carter's Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines.īacked by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan 'Make America Great Again' - and prevailed. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline a cadre of secretive 'New Right' organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking point - and Reagan's own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world's 'shining city on a hill'. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run.

With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. From the best-selling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power.

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