Why is this May 2008 book relevant today?

Because it provides a colorful, insightful, provocative, enjoyable journey through a period when we saw the emergence of angry culture wars in America, not to mention the Southern Strategy. The latter was really the targeting of white males who felt threatened and disenfranchised by the emergence of minorities and women with rights to a piece of the American pie, formerly sliced up exclusively by -- well -- white males.

Perlstein is a liberal -- and a BuzzFlash reader -- but he doesn't spare liberals their mistakes or foolish moments in this book.

The Nixon era set the tone for the exploitation of the class divisions through emotional appeals to a mythological America that Ronald Reagan came to build upon. It is the "America on a lapel pin" that seizes the brains of even million-dollar salaried ABC News anchors.

Of course, this is accompanied by the knowledge that media savvy Republican consultants assisted, and continue to do so, Republican politicians -- and more than a few Democrats -- in openly deceiving the middle class through emotional hot button "wedge issues" and code words.

Don't forget that Nixon lost the presidential election in 1960 and then lost an election for governor of California. He held an infamous news conference after the latter defeat in which he declared that "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

But Tricky Dick emerged a few year laters -- repackaged with the help of Madison Avenue advertising specialists and the likes of Roger Ailes -- as the new Nixon, running on a platform of lies and divisive emotional appeals.

How did we come to this, shortly after the peaceful, prosperous post World War II Eisenhower Republican years?

"Nixonland" is a good place to begin to understand, as the turmoil of the early and late sixties set up divisions in the American cultural and psychological mindset that continue through to this election, even within the Democratic primaries.

We almost never mention Amazon.com recommendations, but this book is one of their 7 picks for best book choices in May.

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear.

Starred review from Publisher's Weekly:

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rick Perlstein. Scribner, (896p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4302-5

Perlstein, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, provides a compelling account of Richard Nixon as a masterful harvester of negative energy, turning the turmoil of the 1960s into a ladder to political notoriety. Perlstein’s key narrative begins at about the time of the Watts riots, in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s overwhelming 1964 victory at the polls against Goldwater, which left America’s conservative movement broken. Through shrewdly selected anecdotes, Perlstein demonstrates the many ways Nixon used riots, anti–Vietnam War protests, the drug culture and other displays of unrest as an easy relief against which to frame his pitch for his narrow win of 1968 and landslide victory of 1972. Nixon spoke of solid, old-fashioned American values, law and order and respect for the traditional hierarchy. In this way, says Perlstein, Nixon created a new dividing line in the rhetoric of American political life that remains with us today. At the same time, Perlstein illuminates the many demons that haunted Nixon, especially how he came to view his political adversaries as “enemies” of both himself and the nation and brought about his own downfall.