Eve of Destruction - Couverture souple

Patterson, James T.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0465064876 ISBN 13 : 9780465064878

Editeur : Basic Books, 2014

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

The Eve of Destruction is impossible to put down, an exciting but also disturbing look at 1965, the year when what we now think of as the sixties' really began. For those of us who admire the great liberal achievements of the civil rights movement, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the 89th Congress, James Patterson has written a cautionary tale, showing how and why a conservative reaction that's still with us began building at liberalism's zenith. And the fateful, gradual escalation of the Vietnam War haunts this account, as it came to haunt LBJ. Those who lived through 1965 will want to read this book; those who didn't ought to read it to understand today's political world.” 

John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi While in many respects 1965 was a very good year the Voting Rights Act, Head Start, and Medicare come quickly to mind trouble lay ahead. The civil rights coalition was starting to unravel just as the specter of Vietnam loomed large on the horizon. In this illuminating, absorbing, page-turner of a book, James T. Patterson makes the case that After 1965, for better and for worse, the United States would never be the same again.'”
Michael Beschloss  One of America's greatest historians makes a powerful argument that the most important historical pivot of the revolutionary 1960s was not President Kennedy's assassination or the tumult of 1968, but the fateful moment when Lyndon Johnson, at his zenith, turned from his Great Society to escalate the war in Vietnam, and when his passage of the Voting Rights Act was quickly followed by riots in Watts.  So evocatively does James Patterson take us back into the vanished world of 1965 that many readers will wish they could travel back in time and somehow change the tragic arc of history.”

Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University  Based on rich learning and resonant with thoughtful interpretations, this incisive and lucid book does more than identify a point of inflection. Its fascinating chronicle captures and explains how a configuration of racial and social change, popular culture, robust legislative action, and a fierce and often brutal war as well as unrest at home decisively altered the vectors of American life in ways that simply had not been anticipated just before 1965.” 

Steven M. Gillon, Scholar-in-Residence, The History Channel

Commonweal
Political liberals may find comfort in the disarray of today's Republican Party. But it wasn't so long ago that their own troubles set the stage for the Reagan Era. Historian James T. Patterson skillfully chronicles that period in The Eve of Destruction.”

Irish Times
"[An] elegantly written and finely nuanced work on the US in the 1960s.... Picking up more or less where Robert Caro left off in the latest volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Patterson makes a convincing case that the US was a fundamentally different place at the end of 1965 from what it had been a year earlier.... One of the many strengths of this graceful book... is that the author never overstates his case. In fact, and rather pleasingly, he is always keen to challenge it."

American History Magazine
Voting rights acts, Medicare and Medicaid, Vietnam, protests, riots it was a helluva year, and it set in motion the sea change that created today's relentless confrontational politics.”

Publishers Weekly
A thoughtful look at a tumultuous period.... Writing in an informative, accessible manner, Patterson creates a strong narrative, his recitation of facts helping to build his case that 1965 rather than 1968 or 1969 marked a political, cultural, and military turning point for America.”
Boston Globe
[The Eve of Destruction] is no romantic romp of nostalgia. It is a searching look at a year that spawned Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legacy of legislation on education, civil rights, and health and produced a high tide of American liberalism even as bloody confrontations at Selma, bombings in North Vietnam, and a credibility gap in the capital showed cracks in the American edifice . Meticulously described and deftly analyzed.”

San Francisco Chronicle
Our yearlong pivot from self-congratulation to national turmoil and near-rupture is the topic of The Eve of Destruction, an engaging chronicle by James T. Patterson, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 . By focusing on the widening gyre of crisis Selma, Pleiku, Saigon, Watts Patterson persuasively argues for the inclusion of 1965 in an elite roster of transformative years. His narrative imparts the dizzying speed of events that left so many Americans wondering what was happening to their country and whether government really could meet the era's daunting new challenges.”

Alan Brinkley, author of John F. Kennedy
James Patterson, one of the most prolific and thoughtful historians of our generation, has written a brilliant book that shows us how the 1960s became such a destructive period in our recent history. It was not because of the youth revolt, nor even because of the civil rights movement, but because of Lyndon Johnson's embrace of the Vietnam War.”

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
Reading Patterson's chronicle, I am all too painfully put back in that terrible year [1965], with all the shock and disenchantment it brought . The Eve of Destruction should be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris and, by no means incidentally, the dangers of misreading election returns as mandates.”

Wall Street Journal
Patterson argues correctly, I think that 1965 was one of those hinge years” when history turns and goes in another, unexpected direction. The history of a single year isn't easy to write, but Mr. Patterson handles the task well . All in all, The Eve of Destruction is an illuminating look at a remarkably significant year by a master historian.”

Smart, thoughtful, fast-paced, engaging, and insightful these are just a few of the adjectives that describe James T. Patterson's masterful new book, The Eve of Destruction. Patterson makes a convincing case that you cannot understand America today without coming to terms with this eventful, and in some cases, tragic, year.” 

David M. Kennedy, Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University Philip Roth once called the immediate post-World War II decades the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.' James Patterson's The Eve of Destruction chronicles the origins of the awful reckoning that followed. Focusing on the single, fateful year of 1965, Patterson's masterful account details the incipient fissures in American society that grew into gaping chasms by the decade's end. A sobering and essential read about a world we have lost and the troubled birth of our own.”

E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Our Divided Political Heart

Présentation de l'éditeur :

At the beginning of 1965, the U.S. seemed on the cusp of a golden age. Although Americans had been shocked by the assassination in 1963 of President Kennedy, they exuded a sense of consensus and optimism that showed no signs of abating. Indeed, political liberalism and interracial civil rights activism made it appear as if 1965 would find America more progressive and unified than it had ever been before. In January 1965, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed that the country had no irreconcilable conflicts.”

Johnson, who was an extraordinarily skillful manager of Congress, succeeded in securing an avalanche of Great Society legislation in 1965, including Medicare, immigration reform, and a powerful Voting Rights Act. But as esteemed historian James T. Patterson reveals in The Eve of Destruction, that sense of harmony dissipated over the course of the year. As Patterson shows, 1965 marked the birth of the tumultuous era we now know as The Sixties,” when American society and culture underwent a major transformation. Turmoil erupted in the American South early in the year, when police attacked civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Many black leaders, outraged, began to lose faith in nonviolent and interracial strategies of protest. Meanwhile, the U.S. rushed into a deadly war in Vietnam, inciting rebelliousness at home. On August 11th, five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, racial violence exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The six days of looting and arson that followed shocked many Americans and cooled their enthusiasm for the president's remaining initiatives. As the national mood darkened, the country became deeply divided. By the end of 1965, a conservative resurgence was beginning to redefine the political scene even as developments in popular music were enlivening the Left.

In The Eve of Destruction, Patterson traces the events of this transformative year, showing how they dramatically reshaped the nation and reset the course of American life.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Basic Books
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0465064876
• ISBN 13: 9780465064878
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 345