Please join us in the Fourth Floor Conference Center of the UWM Golda Meir Library (located at 2311 E. Hartford Avenue in Milwaukee) for a fascinating event with the “chronicler extraordinaire of American conservatism” (Politico), Milwaukeean Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Before the Storm, as he discusses and signs copies of the third volume of his acclaimed political history of conservatism in America, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. This event is co-sponsored… Show more by the Friends of the Golda Meir Library and The UWM Libraries.
In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein not only brings to panoramic life one of the most tumultuous eras in the nation’s history, but reveals how the transition from Nixon to Reagan marked the end of a fraught period of national soul-searching and resurrected what he calls America’s “cult of official optimism,” which persists to the present day and across the political spectrum. He writes: “This is a book about how Ronald Reagan came within a hair’s breadth of becoming the 1976 Republican nominee for president…But it is also about much more. In the years between 1973 and 1976, America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history.” With The Invisible Bridge, Rick Perlstein—one of the most exciting and original voices in narrative history at work today—has written a foundational work for readers who want to grasp what America was really going through in the critical decade of the 1970s, as well as how the current political and cultural landscape came to be.
“Outstanding…Full of the tragic, the infuriating, and the darkly funny, Perlstein captures the frantic nature of the period…in this massive and wide-ranging portrait.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Author: Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, The New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among other publications. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. Originally from Milwaukee, he currently lives in Chicago.
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