Our Country [Paperback]

Michael Barone (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0029018625 | ISBN-13: 978-0029018620 | Publication Date: May 25, 1992

Combining his proven mastery of political facts and trends with a rich narrative, Barone tells the story of how the country of our parents was transformed through each political era into the country as we know it today.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A whistle-stop survey of U.S. politics from Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush, with visits at what seems like each biennial election, poll, primary, and policy question of these six decades. More than anything else it resembles a deluxe edition of The Almanac of American Politics (Barone & Co., 1982), of which Barone is coauthor, a blend of observation, statistical analysis, and minutiae. At points the book is good, as when Barone uses polling data to illuminate Truman's surprise 1948 victory over Dewey. But his overall theme of the primacy of cultural over economic issues isn't new, and with pronouncements such as, "the whole country in the middle 1980s seemed at peace with itself," occasionally Barone lands somewhere between the fatuous and the meaningless. Some political junkies will feast, but most readers will do better with any one of several more general sur- veys, most recently James MacGregor Burns's The Crosswinds of Freedom (LJ 4/1/89).
- Robert F. Nardini, N. Chichester, N . H .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 805 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (May 25, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029018625
• ISBN-13: 978-0029018620
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #830,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The big picture and the small picture, March 7, 2000

By 

Todd Winer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Country (Paperback)

Two warnings: First, the book is long. Second, the author is conservative and doesn't make an effort to hide it. If these facts don't disturb you then I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is a wonderful story of twentieth-century American politics, crammed with polls, stats, and insightful commentary. Why has ethnicity been a more important factor in politics than class? How did the political pendulum shift from conservatism to liberalism to conservatism again? Who are some of the most important statesmen in history that you've never heard of? And much, much more. If Michael Barone's "The Almanac of American Politics" is the Holy Bible of politics, then this work is a book of prayer.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book I know on twentieth-century American history, November 30, 1999

By 

Bob Carrico (Irvine, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Country (Paperback)

Barone knows American political history inside and out. He gives the reader crisp, incisive portraits of individuals from Henry Wallace to Jack Kemp, of legislation from the Taft-Hartley Act to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and he shows the reader how these people and measures fit into and shaped the world as it existed in their time. (The first two chapters, in which he presents brief portraits of Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Tammany Hall politico Charles Murphy, brilliantly illuminate how Republicans and Democrats thought and felt about their country in the early 1920s.) In addition, Barone knows the hard data of politics -- survey results, voting patterns, demographics -- and analyzes them in ways which often produce striking insights. His analysis of the timing and nature of the New Deal realignment, and the patchy and hesitant way in which liberal policies came to be accepted in the three decades or so following 1932, ought to be read by anyone interested in how ideological shifts really take place in American politics. Lastly, Barone (a journalist and former Democratic activist) recognizes and respects the achievements of the United States in the twentieth century -- and doesn't define "achievement" solely as "movement towards the political left" (as many other writers on American history, even sincere admirers like Harold Evans, sometime seem to do.) I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone with an interest in twentieth-century political and social change.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Culture, not Economics, December 29, 2003

By 

Buce (Palookaville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Country (Paperback)

Michael Barone is the co-creator (with Grant Ujifusa) of the Almanac of American Politics, itself an almost inexhaustible well of the curious and (sometimes) interesting. Our Country is an effort to put the same sensibility to work in a narrative history. Barone has absorbed a lot and forgotten little, and he likes to remind the reader of things others are more likely to forget. Civil rights, for example. One wing of the Republican party had its roots planted firmly in the abolitionist movement, dating back to before the Civil War. You could call it "the Eisenhower wing," if you were clear that it did not include Eisenhower. As general, and later as president, it seems fair to say that Eisenhower just didn't get it - not so much hostility to blacks as a kind of blank incomprehension - why weren't they willing to keep the place (one is tempted to make comparisons with General Sherman). Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, is one who emphatically did get it. Vulnerable and insecure as he always saw himself, Johnson was able to show real empathy for the plight of American Blacks. So we have the kind of irony so familiar in politics - the soldier-statesman who didn't get it, imposing a civil rights bill on Congress against the best efforts of the cracker politician who did.

Barone obviously relishes the irony there, but he likes the story in particular because of an even more consistent enthusiasm. That is: he is fascinated by the hard work of governing, which he comes close to glamorizing in its very unglamorousness. You can see it perhaps best in his appreciative account of a man who he nominates as a forgotten progenitor of modern social legislation - Robert Wagner, the senator and father, inter alia, of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. Without Wagner, as Barone tells it, the New Deal's legislative agenda would have been a lot more insipid. It perhaps explains also his affection for Hubert Humphrey - a name perhaps mostly forgotten today, or remembered if at all only in the sour aftertaste of the 1968 presidential election, which he lost to Richard Nixon.

What perhaps gives zest to Barone's account is that for all his skill as a data-miner, he believes at the end that politics is culture and not economics that divides us or draws us together. It impels him to insist that there is a society more important than its contentions and divisions, more than the sum of its parts - in some sense, a res publica, or (back to Barone's title here) "Our Country." Only one afterthought: this is another book that cries out for an new edition.