Digital List Price: | $19.99 |
Kindle Price: | $2.99 Save $17.00 (85%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man Kindle Edition
In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list,” Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often “very amusing” look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews).
Arguing that Nixon was a reflection of the country that elected him, Wills examines not only the psychology of the man himself and his relationships with others—from his wife, Pat, to his vice-president, Spiro Agnew—but also the state of the nation at the time, mired in the Vietnam War and experiencing a cultural rift that pitted the young against the old. Putting his findings into moral, economic, intellectual, and political contexts, he ultimately “paints a broad and provocative landscape of the nation’s—and Nixon’s—travails” (The New York Times).
Simultaneously compassionate and critical, and raising interesting perspectives on the shifting definitions of terms like “conservative” and “liberal” over recent decades, Nixon Agonistes is a brilliant and indispensable book from one of America’s most acclaimed historians.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media
- Publication dateJune 20, 2017
- File size3207 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
“The best book so far about the man, the best written, the best thought out.” —The New York Review of Books
“The wit of Nixon Agonistes is a constant delight. Heckling, breezy, allusive . . . [Wills] is a born reporter, a cartoonist in words, master of a tradition of tongue-in-cheek sassiness that goes back well over a century in American political journalism.” —Commentary
“Wills succeeds, in the end, in making his point, about Nixon, and about America. . . . The topic is fascinating, and Wills has ideas which never occurred to other writers.” —The Harvard Crimson
“[Nixon Agonistes is] still the one indispensable primer on modern American politics après le déluges of the clamorous 1960s, part Mencken, part Aristotle, part Moby Dick.” —Prospect Magazine
“[Wills] draws us into this multifaceted study with legwork: reportage of Nixon’s 1968 Wisconsin campaign, investigations of Whittier family and landmarks, the Republican and Democratic conventions. . . . He can be very amusing, as in his comparisons of American liberals to Dostoevsky’s Verkhovensky and David Eisenhower to Howdy Doody. The book alternates selective biography with state-of-the-republic impressions and political flashbacks. Wills sketches advisers and allies; a sharp fresh review of early campaigns; [and] Nixon's vexed relationship with Eisenhower.” —Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B071YSGMX5
- Publisher : Open Road Media (June 20, 2017)
- Publication date : June 20, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 3207 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 696 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #257,242 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #191 in 20th Century History of the U.S.
- #196 in Biographies of US Presidents
- #345 in Ideologies & Doctrines
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
A wide ranging study of Richard Nixon -- the man, the career, and the times that shaped both the man and the career. It is uncanny in the way it a foreshadows Nixon's self-destructive impulses: his paranoia, his introversion, his secrecy, his distrust, his self-doubts, his insecurities which combined to lead him to Watergate's half-truths, deceits, prevarications, denials, lies, enemies list, and so on.
The Nixon that emerges from these pages is hardworking, and always over-prepared for everything, a man who scripted and edited his every word and gesture. If he seemed wooden and without spontaneity it is because he was his own puppet master, jerking the wires to jaw and arm. Supposing himself to lack the assets of others (the personal charm of Charles Percy, the grace of William Scranton, the wit of Adlai Stevenson, the courage of John Lindsay, the gravitas of Robert Taft, the respect accorded Dwight Eisenhower, the dignity of George Romney, the mental agility of Harold Stassen, the experience of Henry Cabot Lodge, the wealth of Nelson Rockefeller, the good looks of John Kennedy) Nixon compensated for all these these gifts bestowed on others by working longer and harder than anyone else with that famous "iron butt." Everything he ever did in public was practiced, rehearsed, revised, practiced, rejected, redone, and so on until he reached the robotic result we all saw.
He would never give in to the human impulse to look at his watch while listening to a voter rant as George Bush (once did and was excoriated for so doing).
If Nixon throughout his career looked tired it was because he was, not having slept but instead planned, edited, and revised the next day's every word and gesture. Nixon never trusted himself still less anyone else. This deep-rooted sense of inferiority seems to have come from nowhere; his childhood and family life before politics are numbingly ordinary.
As early as 1952 Nixon supposed that even members of his own party despised him (for his lack for such gifts as mentioned above) and this conclusion made him all the more determined never to put a foot wrong. One result of this determination was his distinctive reluctance ever to say anything in his own voice; instead he would say: "as a voter I met in Arizona said...," or ‘as President Eisenhower said...,’ or ‘sources close to the Prime Minister said,’ and so on. It is likely that the first few times these attributions were true but in time it became a habit to distance himself from himself. Wills describes how Nixon reacted to his own successful nomination in 1968 as an example. Convincing.
Then there is his first inaugural, an embarrassing parroting of Kennedy’s, as if somehow to capture that magic. This Nixon reminds me of Kenneth Widmerpool when Barbara Goring poured the sugar bowl on his head (or the earlier banana incident); he was grateful to be noticed: even if as a fool. (Widmerpool is the central character in Antony Powell’s magnificient twelve volume novel, Dance to the Music of Time.)
Though it has nothing to do with Nixon, I particularly enjoyed Wills’s deflation of some of Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s many pretensions. That made me wonder how they cooperated when Schlesinger commissioned him to write the brief biography of James Madison (2002) in a series. Time may have healed that wound.
In 1969 Wills refers to 'men' when he means 'people.' This will outrage anachronistic style police. I found it distracting and annoying,
I don't thoroughly know politics and history. Perhaps there are better chronicles of the transformation of our country from a productive agricultural and manufacturing society to one that primarily makes vapor and shuffles Monopoly money around. But Wills' account of the first part of the shift that occurred after World War II to bring us to the 21st century "Information Age" is very useful to me. Maybe it should be grouped with Rick Perlstein's trilogy about this period. Garry Wills certainly can write deftly and artfully though.