Rick Perlstein has written an enthralling and indispensable book about our collective life and times--and "indispensable" remains a useful adjective even if Madeleine Albright taints it by overapplication to American foreign policy. At least the first 435 pp. of Nixonland qualify--this is as many pages of the book as I've been able to read while navigating through an intense cold. I can't say I "couldn't put it down." I have to keep putting it down. Fifty pages of Perlstein in one reading leaves me in a state of rage and dumb horror, entailing the need for a recovery interval. Thus "enthralling" is also precisely what I mean. The momentum is unrelenting--an extraordinary writerly achievement. And no matter how much I thought I know about those times, Rick unearths actual cold facts I didn't know.

But let me say a few words about concepts. First, where I wholeheartedly agree: Rick is right to focus on "positive polarization." This is how Nixon made himself the victor of the 1968 Gotterdämmerung. I'm sure he's also right that Nixon excelled at managing the unleashed rages of the "silent majority" because he was so much one of them. The power of "positive polarization" taught a lesson that remains at the core of the Republican party--cf. Atwater, Rove, Bush, and stormy, huffy McCain, the McCain of whom we'll be seeing a lot more over the next five months. Positive polarization is the core idea that has to be grasped to understand the '60s et seq., and Rick grasps it.

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