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Rick Perlstein

  • Originally published 08/08/2013

    Rick Perlstein: ALEC's Illegal Past?

    Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.

  • Originally published 07/09/2013

    Rick Perlstein: Chicago Rising!

    Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.On a sunny Saturday this past May, far down on the city’s black South Side where corner stores house their cashiers behind bulletproof plexiglass, about 150 activists assembled at Jesse Owens Community Academy. In just a few days, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s appointed Board of Education would vote on the largest simultaneous school closing in recent history. Owens, along with fifty-three other public schools, was on the chopping block. A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll found that more than 60 percent of Chicago citizens opposed the closings, and a healthy cross section of them had turned out for the first of three straight days of marches in protest.

  • Originally published 06/10/2013

    Rick Perlstein: The NSA Doppelganger

    Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.What goes around comes around.The latest news in the National Security Agency spy scandal: that the NSA has been Hoovering up your emails, documents, and connection details directly from the servers of nine US Internet companies. And that, according to NBC News, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the United States ever since the passage of the Patriot Act. And they have been doing so with legal immunity. Barack Obama has been helping with that, since well before he was president; and now that he is, he does what presidents do, which is to aggrandize the power of their office by whatever means at their disposal.We have been here before.

  • Originally published 05/01/2013

    Rick Perlstein: Times Square Blues

    Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland.I was in New York last week, and one of the people I visited with was my friend Mike Edison, whose qualifications for the job (being my friend, I mean, and for being your friend, too) are listed on the résumé that doubles as the title of his 2008 memoir: I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World. The notorious magazines include stoner rag High Times, which he published, and the only-in-New-York Bible of repulsiveness known as Screw, which Edison helped take over upon the retirement of Al Goldstein. I met Mike after he sent me his most recent book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, a history of pornography, to blurb. I did so from the bottom of my heart: “Mike Edison can go toe to toe with some of the best writers of the (old) New Journalism. This is foul-mouthed popular history at its most entertaining. Plenty smart, too—and also, strange to say, poignant and loving.” (Hugh Hefner is the villain. I liked that.)

  • Originally published 01/16/2013

    Rick Perlstein: Our Obama Bargain

    Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008).We have on our hands a President Groundhog Day. Tom Tomorrow nails it in this recent cartoon, as he so often does: regularly, and regularly and regularly, Obama initiates a negotiation; finds his negotiating partner maneuvering him into an absurd impasse; then “negotiates” his way out of a crisis with a settlement deferring reckoning (in the former of further negotiation) to some specified time time in the future, at which point he somehow imagines negotiation will finally, at long last, work—at which point the next precipice arrives, and he lets his negotiating partners defer the reckoning once more....

  • Originally published 06/29/2009

    Nixonland: An Interview with Rick Perlstein

    Rick Shenkman

    Rick Perlstein's books have helped redefine the history of American conservatism in the modern era. His first book in a projected trilogy was Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. The next book was Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (paperback, April 2009). This interview was conducted by email.