Okay if you can adjust for the liberal bias

books:


	• Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford History of the United States) James T. Patterson Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Okay if you can adjust for the liberal bias

The book flunks (maybe c-) on Bush vs. Gore: This statement from Wikipedia is entirely accurate - Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a United States Supreme Court case heard on December 11, 2000. In a per curiam opinion, by a vote of 7-2, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional, and by a vote of 5-4, the Court held that no alternative scheme could be established within the time limits established by Florida Legislature.[1]. The per curiam opinion was argued on the basis of Equal Protection.[2]
The decision stopped the recount that was occurring in Florida and allowed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's previous certification of George W. Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand.

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First good history of the last 30 years

I read this book for a graduate class in American history. James T. Patterson's book is a historical overview of American history, which starts with one constitutional crisis and one of America's darkest hours politically, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and ends with another test of America's constitution, the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, which settled the presidential election of 2000. The intervening years between these two tests to America's constitution are "a tale of national resilience and even regeneration" (xii). Patterson's book is extremely prescient at describing the socio-economic changes that took place during the period. For the political angle, Patterson does an outstanding job of providing information about new political movements that rose to power in America; however, his information on the presidential administrations during the period is scant. His lack of real in-depth analysis of the presidential administrations has much to do with the fact that most archival information has not been made available to scholars for study and comment. Patterson's book reads like a high school history textbook. Thus, Patterson's book must be looked upon as a good historical overview of the period and if one wants a more detailed history then one will need to examine other books that give a more in-depth analysis on particular events of the period.

Patterson's description, in the beginning of his book, of the changing political and cultural institutions of the 1970's is very informative and his analysis agrees with other historians such as Bruce Schulman. Every institution and its leadership was mistrusted and looked upon with great derision by many Americans. Patterson observed that this mistrust stemmed "from the media, whose leaders had become considerably more skeptical and confrontational as a result of the travails of Vietnam and Watergate, and which questioned if any authorities could be trusted" (10-11). In addition, many Americans were uncomfortable by the violence and degradation of cultural values that took place during the tumultuous times of the 1960's. By the early 1970's, violent protests in America had declined. However, culturally, Americans witnessed the rise of sexual promiscuity in society. Movie and television situation comedies were replete with sexually promiscuous themes and innuendos. In 1973, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade made abortions legal throughout the nation. Patterson astutely showed out-of-wedlock pregnancy statistics were looked upon as a barometer by many in society to prove that cultural mores were grossly out of control. "The statistics by race were shocking: In 1970, 38 percent of black babies were illegitimate, compared to 6 percent for whites. By 1990, 67 percent of black babies were illegitimate, as opposed to 17 percent for whites" (48-49). Finally, the American economy was in decline, and neither the Ford nor Carter administrations economic remedies were able to make an effective change in America's declining economy. A new word was added to the American economic lexicon, Stagflation, a condition never before witnesses by economists, in which the growth of the economy was stagnant, unemployment was high, and inflation was rising precipitously. America's large urban areas and industrial centers In the Northeast and Midwest were in decay and became known as the Rustbelt. Jobs and industry were both moving south and west to the Sunbelt states or were moving overseas, especially to Japan, a country seen by many Americans as a rising economic superpower that would soon become economically preeminent over America. All of these challenges to America's confidence had its citizens wondering if they were witnessing the decline of America as a world power economically and politically. American moral and confidence was shaken even further when President Carter on July 15, 1979, delivered to the nation what would historically become known as his "Malaise" speech. It was a speech that created a crisis of confidence in America precipitated by the economic down turn and the energy crunch in America. Whether America would be able to survive this tear in its national fabric was a real open question for many when looking to the future.

In conclusion, Patterson's book did an excellent job in exploring the challenges posed to Americans in the 1970's and how they were met over the next two decades. He showed how activism changed in America, this time it took a noticeable turn to the right. Evangelical Christians unhappy with the moral decay of the sixties and seventies, traditional conservatives unhappy with America's decline on the world stage, and fiscal conservatives unhappy with the explosion of new government social welfare programs and rising taxes to pay for them, came together to form the "New Right" within the Republican party. In 1980, they would nominate Ronal Reagan with his boyish optimism and his message that there was nothing wrong with America that new political leadership could not fix. Reagan effectively beat Carter by asking Americans if "they were better off today than they were four years ago?" Patterson observed that the eighties and the nineties became decades of renewed American confidence in American military and foreign policy prowess as well as economic successes. The world became a safer place to live for all its inhabitants due to the nuclear arms reduction treaties brokered between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, which lead to the end of the Cold War in 1990, "with hardly a shot being fired in anger" (424). America's economy made a crucial turn for the better during the Reagan administration with economic policies instituted by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who choked off the nation's money supply and brought inflation down to a manageable four percent, which spurred America's economic growth once again. Greenspan would engender such confidence in his economic policies that he was asked by America's next three presidents to stay on the job. America's economic health would continue in the nineties under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who cut taxes and government spending and proved to be more pro business than his Democratic successors. Thus, Patterson's book ends with the observation that many "citizens of the United States had conveniences, comforts, and real incomes that would have been hard to imagine in 1974" (424).

As a graduate student I recommend this book for anyone interested in Reagan, American History, Cold War History.

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Great finish to a wonderful series

Patterson delivers another smash hit in his book on the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. This book is a less historiography study and more of a statistical approach than other oxford books but it is nonetheless expertly presented. The analysis is top quality and the sense of how the United States became restless (especially during the 1990's is apparent. Patterson makes a good argument that we have to wait and see what effect 9/11 will have and whether or not it was the changing milestone. If you are interested in this time period this is a must read. For those who are interested in American studies this is an essential book for your library.

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Excellent

Restless Giant, By James Patterson, is a sweeping social/political and economic history of life in the United States from the end of the Watergate scandal to the controversial election of 2000. It is another component in the Oxford History of the United States series.

Patterson ties together modern history in a precise way. His prose is even and interesting. Though many of the subjects are extremely familiar, his even handed treatment and conclusions are clear. This is a very excellent one-volume summation of our modern times.

The Jury's Still Out...

An interesting thing, the Oxford History of the United States is. Almost three decades after the first volume, only four volumes have yet to follow, covering less then half of the United States' existence.

The individual books vary in quality. Previous volumes included two of the best written history books, Pulitzer-prize winning tombs by James McPherson (on the Civil War Era) and David Kennedy (on the Great Depression and the Civil War). But the series also featured an unreadable, messy account of the American Revolution (by Robert Middlekauf), and the previous book by James T Patterson, which I haven't read.

Patterson's Restless Giant, his follow up to `Great Expectations' is an overall entertaining and informative book. It is hampered by a few problems that are inherent, and a few that are the author's in making.

First, the period of time Patterson gets 1974-2000, is odd. The subtitle is "From Watergate to Bush v. Gore", but there is very little that connects these two scandals, and very few events that spanned these years alone. The editors of the series should have taken the well traveled road, and closed the volume with the end of the Cold War.

The second problem is one of perspective. We are simply too close to most of the events, particularly those of the 1990s, to get an objective view about them. The great majority of the actors in Patterson's drama were still alive while he wrote about them, and most were still politically active. Virtually everything that was written about the events served implicitly or explicitly some political agenda. Objectivity is very hard to find.

The third problem is that the 1970s, 80s and 90s are simply not as inherently interesting as the Civil War and World War 2 eras. That's not to say that there were dull - far from it - but the inherent drama of the struggles for civilizations that Lincoln and Roosevelt had to confront makes better reading then the less-than-heroic attempts by Reagan to disguise his "Robin Hood in reverse" policies with Patriotic rhetoric.

Patterson's books starts off weak, with long confused chapters about the 1970s. In these early chapters, Patterson doesn't so much narrate as lists: economic statistics, crime rates statistics, political scandals, foreign policy adventures. Compare Patterson's short, matter-of-fact description of the Iranian Hostage Crisis (126-27), with James McPherson's account of John Brown's Harper Ferry raid in "Battle Cry of Freedom". I doubt Brown's attack was any less consequential then the Iranian crisis, which contributed to Carter's downfall, marked the first confrontation between the US and the Radical new regime of Iran, raised anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and marked the first outright failure of American Foreign Policy in the Middle East.

Things get better when Patterson comes to the 1980s, and particularly to Ronald Reagan. Reagan's colorful personality and bizarre politics characterized the US more then most presidents, and Patterson's description of him and his age is quite effective. Still, there is a lot to quiver with: Although Patterson doesn't ignore Reagan's role in the Cold War, his discussion is quite shallow. Patterson hardly addresses the transformation of Conservative thought, and the slow emergent of neo-conservatives, either during the Reagan administration or in the 1990s; Jeanne Kirkpatrick and her seminal paper about "Dictatorships and Double standards" aren't even mentioned. This is like writing about the origin of the Cold War and ignoring George Kennan.

Unlike Kennedy and McPherson who used first rate economic analysis, Patterson's economic information is not really sound. His even handed approach toward Supply Side Economics, resembles "He said, she said" journalism of the worst kind. The great change of the 1990s - the rise in Productivity Growth - is barely mentioned, and Patterson's analysis of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) is not very deep.

In reading about the administration of George H W. Bush, one is struck by how efficient and effective his rule was; Unlike his son, Bush pere worked with Democrats, balanced the budget, and led a careful and masterful foreign policy, including a successful war in Iraq. Although Bush's abandonment of the Kurds must be held against him, it would be a shame if his very real triumphs would be overshadowed by the disastrous presidency of his son.

Patterson's account of the 1990s suffers from some of the same problems as his discussion of the 1970s. Again featuring a "kitchen sink" of cultural, political, demographical, legal and economic data, it's rather messy. Patterson also exposes his cultural biases in his tirades against violent movies (such as Tarantino's brilliant "Pulp Fiction") and downplays, even if he doesn't ignore, the development of the internet (Microsoft gets all of two mentions. Napster gets none). The discussions of the Clinton persecutions and the OJ Simpson trial fail to raise any new insights, and I doubt many current readers would find them very illuminating. With the passage of time, though, new generations of readers, who may be less familiar with these developments, may find here a useful primer.

Ultimately, it's hard to view the decades covered by `Restless Giant' objectively. A future historian might focus more on the rising of the Neo-Conservative movement, or on the cracks inside the seemingly uniform Fundamentalist Christian coalition. She may locate the first signs for a Muslim movement in America, and of a new wave of religious extremism (as in the spooky `Jesus Camp' documentary I just watched). She may discuss the rise of Protectionism and anti-Immigration movements. Hopefully, she may single out the emergence of a new center, committed to the best values in both the Democratic and the Republican traditions: Balanced Budgets and Welfare for the poor, Free Trade and Civil Rights, Separation of Powers and of Church and State, and a sane, idealistic yet realistic foreign policy. The administrations of Bush the father and of Bill Clinton took steps (however hesitant and at times misguided) in the right direction. For America's sake, and for the World's, let's hope that America returns to that path.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

In Restless Giant, acclaimed historical author James Patterson provides a crisp, concise assessment of the twenty-seven years between the resignation of Richard Nixon and the election of George W. Bush in a sweeping narrative that seamlessly weaves together social, cultural, political, economic, and international developments. We meet the era's many memorable figures and explore the "culture wars" between liberals and conservatives that appeared to split the country in two.
Patterson describes how America began facing bewildering developments in places such as Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq, and discovered that it was far from easy to direct the outcome of global events, and at times even harder for political parties to reach a consensus over what attempts should be made. At the same time, domestic issues such as the persistence of racial tensions, high divorce rates, alarm over crime, and urban decay led many in the media to portray the era as one of decline. Patterson offers a more positive perspective, arguing that, despite our often unmet expectations, we were in many ways better off than we thought. By 2000, most Americans lived more comfortably than they had in the 1970s, and though bigotry and discrimination were far from extinct, a powerful rights consciousness insured that these were less pervasive in American life than at any time in the past.
With insightful analyses and engaging prose, Restless Giant captures this period of American history in a way that no other book has, illuminating the road that the United States traveled from the dismal days of the mid-1970s through the hotly contested election of 2000.
The Oxford History of the United States
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

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