(Rick Perlstein)

Rick Perlstein (headshot)

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Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner). His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.

He received a B.A. in history from the University of Chicago in 1992, where his cultural criticism was published in the Baffler, and spent two years in the PhD program in American culture at the University of Michigan. Moving to New York, he worked for two years as an editor at Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life; while at Lingua Franca. Perlstein's freelance book reviews and essays have appeared in publications including _Slate, the Village Voice, Newsday and The Nation. His work later appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, the London Review of Books, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Yorker.

In 1998 Perlstein met his future wife, Kathy Geier. In the fall of 2002 they moved to Chicago, where Geier is pursuing a Ph.D. in public policy.

blurbs

No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark (Melville House, 7/12/2007)

This is the archeology of two Newark riots—the first one by angry slum dwellers, the second the savage retaliation by the forces of "law and order." Telling a story like this took enormous courage and industry. Ron Porambo's book is simply a monument in investigative journalism.
The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years And the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (Columbia, 1/2/2007)

The first satisfying account of how Reagan evolved into a conservative.
Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of Democracy (Yale, 10/03/2006)

Outdated political science clichés go flying like bad guys in a Kung Fu movie in this revelatory new book. American politics is supposed to be prone to stalemate. Extremists are supposed to be relegated to the dustbin of history. So how come policies so radically at odds with what the American people say they want have been locked in for the next generation? Hacker and Pierson brilliantly nail the case: the Republicans have rigged the system. Off Center provides the missing piece from What's the Matter with Kansas?: how they committed the crime, and where they hid the bodies. Pundits: read it and heed it.
What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (Norton, 09/11/2006)

How are universities like Social Security? Michael Bérubé knows how: the Right hates them both because they show that liberalism works. All liberals should read this book. There is no better ammunition for the war now being waged on them by conservatives—whether they are academics or not. All conservatives should read it too. Then they might understand the true consequences in destroying the autonomy of an institution—American higher education—that remains the envy of the world.
How Would a Patriot Act? (Working Assets, 05/15/2006)

It’s not about liberal. It’s not about conservative. It’s about the Constitution. ‘To be an American means that you cannot be imprisoned without charges, that you have a fair opportunity to defend yourself in a court of law, and that you have a right to be judged by a jury of your peers,’ Greenwald writes. Goodbye to all that — unless you and I start acting like patriots. Reading this book — and then passing it on to a friend — is a great way to start.
Imperial Designs (Routledge, 10/31/2004)

Conservatives used to warn us about the dangers of utopianism: of the unintended consequences of hubristic attempts to socially engineer brave new worlds conjured in the heads of intellectuals. Now Americans are once again learning that lesson, but the perpetrators are...conservatives. Gary Dorrien's guidebook to the men and women who dreamed up our Iraq misadventure is deeply informed, deeply penetrating, and, above all, deeply moral.
What's the Matter with Kansas? (Metropolitan, 06/2004)

This is the true story of how conservatives punk'd a nation. Tom Frank has stripped the right-wing hustle to its core: It is bread and circuses-only without bread. Written like poem, every line in its perfect place, “What's the Matter with Kansas?” is the best new book I've read in years, on any subject.
The New Left Revisited (Temple, 12/2002)

You'll be amazed at how much you think you know about the Sixties is wrong—especially if you've read the standard works on the subject. This is an agenda-setting anthology, adventurous and rigorous in equal measure.

Rick Perlstein

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