The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz
The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz
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The Age of Reagan
A History, 1974-2008

Author: Sean Wilentz

Narrator: Dick Hill

Unabridged: 23 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/30/2008


Synopsis

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.

About Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on American history and politics, including The Rise of American Democracy, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Politicians and the Egalitarians, chosen as Best History Book of the Year by Kirkus and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Wilentz's writings on American music have earned him two Grammy nominations and two Deems-Taylor-ASCAP awards.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Justin on August 13, 2014

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. A......more

Goodreads review by James on September 07, 2011

Sean Wilentz chronicles the political history of the United States from 1974 through the election of 2000, with an epilogue that carries the story through 2008, summarizing the principal consequences of the administration of George W. Bush. He argues that Ronald Reagan was the dominant political fig......more

Goodreads review by Josh on September 26, 2021

I picked this Reagan biography somewhat arbitrarily. (The blogger bestpresidentialbios.com reviews several here, but not Wilentz's.) It actually isn't a biography: Wilentz skims Reagan's early years and instead writes the history of the "Reagan era", a period he defines by a prelude (beginning with......more

Goodreads review by Jack on August 27, 2017

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a cruel, pathetic human who is well on the way to being the worst president in United States history. Living in America during his fucked-up shitshow of a presidency is an endeavor, and it's the custom of most sensible people during these troubled times to think a......more

Goodreads review by Feng on November 06, 2021

Ronald Reagan was a U.S. president between 1980 and 1988. He is still hailed as the “gold standard” of conservatism, in sharp contrast with Donald Trump’s populism dominating today’s Republican Party. “The Age of Reagan” retraces the history between the late Nixon years to the end of George W Bush’s......more