Customer Reviews

Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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I found this book to be a fair minded explaination of how liberalism moved onto the center stage of American thinking in the '30s and still holds sway with a large but shrinking population in the '90s.

The use of biography shows the reader that there really is no vast left wing conspiracy out to turn the US into a nanny state. There are only individual people who have idea about how to solve problems. Sometimes those ideas are good, other times they are not so good.

I last read Alonzo Hamby's work when I was an undergrad in the late 1970's. I find him more compelling a generation later given what is going on in the nation now. What I am trying to understand is the roll of Robert Taft as a progenator of the "right" wing. So little of serious, critical and insightful nature exists about Taft and his times. That said, Hamby's work has the sure-feel of insight. He paints the larger picture from the 1930's to the early 1990's. That makes this book important.

Liberalism and its challengers is a thorough and balanced look at recent American History. Dr. Hamby goes through many of the recent Presidencies giving an open minded and fair evaluation of recent American History. Not clouded by the misinformation of the revionist historians movement this book is very fair. A good and informative read.