Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (Paperback)

~ (Author) "RALPH NADER WAS BORN DURING A BLIZZARD on February 27,1934..." (more)
Key Phrases: checkoff option, auto safety bill, super rally, Ralph Nader, New York, General Motors (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rolling Stone magazine approvingly called him "the most dangerous man in America." Owners of GM stock had less favorable epithets for him after his Corvair exposé. So did many voters, convinced that Al Gore lost only because of Ralph Nader's disruptive presence on the ballot.

Nader, Justin Martin writes in this meticulous biography, has "always taken everything to the extreme." Famed as the founder of the Nixon-era consumer-advocacy group Nader's Raiders, Nader has reveled in his gadfly role and has not been shy of using the courtroom to press his points, from auto safety to electoral reform. Inflexible, fiercely private, and single-minded, Nader seems not to care about being liked--which has lost him many potential allies among his natural constituency, Martin suggests. But he also gets things done, as even his detractors acknowledge.

Martin's book reveals Ralph Nader's many sides, admirable and otherwise. It makes thought-provoking reading for contrarians, would-be crusaders, and students of contemporary politics, no matter how they view Nader's role therein. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

After the success of his Alan Greenspan biography, Martin tackles another subject with tremendous influence on American economics and politics and a largely unknown private life, but this attempt to find the man behind the public figure meets with limited success. This life of the 68-year-old Ralph Nader lingers over his already well-known public advocacy successes, like the fight for auto safety, then quickly skims over the period from 1975 to 2000, eager to get to the behind-the-scenes story of his controversial presidential campaign. The three chapters on the race provide solid chronology, but the larger questions remain open to speculation. Forced to address whether Nader cost Gore the election, the author merely ventures that "the answer lies somewhere near the intersection of political perceptions and first-grade math." He does show, however, how Nader's tenacious, unapologetic campaigning style was likely shaped by his childhood experience attending town meetings in Winsted, Conn., where his immigrant father was famously reluctant to let go of a debate. Martin has interviewed Nader and found plenty of people willing to talk about him, including former Princeton classmates and several "Nader's Raiders" from the 1970s, but never quite pierces the veil of mystery with which his subject has surrounded himself. What the story lacks in personal detail, however, it makes up in historical perspective, clarifying Nader's status as one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; illustrated edition edition (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073820563X
• ISBN-13: 978-0738205632
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,427,262 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbiased portrait of a true American iconoclast, November 8, 2003

By	Eddie Konczal - See all my reviews

I'm admittedly biased towards Ralph Nader, having volunteered and voted for him during the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. That being said, I found this book to be remarkably balanced. It's neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but rather gives equal weight to Nader's achievements and shortcomings.

Martin writes extremely well, with a brisk pace: by page 30 Nader has finished law school, and by page 45 he's written "Unsafe at Any Speed" and is ready to take on GM! Despite the quick pacing, Martin doesn't gloss over Nader's early years: he presents the reader with all the necessary information on Nader's upbringing and influences, relying on well-chosen anecdotes rather than tedious genealogies.

The section on Nader's crusade against GM practically reads like a spy thriller. Fans of Nader will thrill during his "peak period" of 1969-1976, when it seemed he could do no wrong. But those same fans will scratch their head later on, when Nader inexplicably sabotages some of his own initiatives through a refusal to compromise with Congress.

Martin quickens the pace of the book yet again when detailing Nader's quixotic presidential runs. He describes the alienation Nader felt after being rebuffed by the Clinton/Gore administration - a feeling than no doubt sparked his candidacy and defused any feelings of remorse at possibly costing Gore the 2000 election. The irony of Nader's career is that he achieved the most when Republicans were in power, because he expected little of their administrations and focused on galvanizing grassroots efforts to achieve reform.

This is an excellent biography, a revealing portrait of a man who has devoted his life to consumer advocacy and making America a safer place to live.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful...couldn't put it down, July 9, 2005

By	Lee L. (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (Paperback)

For as much as Ralph Nader has influenced and shaped events in this country, most people know next to nothing about the man. Nader has had a long, fruitful career fighting for those without a voice. In this book, Justin Martin has provided the most revealing, eye opening account of a truly great citizen.

As far as biographies go, this book is pretty straitforward. Martin covers Nader's childhood, school days, college days, and then onto Nader's career in Washington D.C. Martin invterviewed members of Nader's family and also his friends to help accumulate the material for the book.

Part of why this book seems so fantastic to me may have something to do with the fact that it's the only one of its kind. If you want to know about how Nader got to where he is today, Martin's book is the only one available. That notwithstanding, I think the book does a great job. The fact that Nader hasn't publicly spoken out against the book also speaks to its merit. If Nader didn't like this book, or thought Martin got anything significant wrong, I believe Ralph would have let us know about it.

Hopefully all those angry democrats will sit down with this book and find out how much good Nader has done for this country...

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but Nader remains an enigma, October 29, 2002

By	Eric Gudorf (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ralph Nader is arguably one of the most fascinating (and polarizing) figures on the American scene. He's been in the public eye for nearly four decades, and has along the way attracted intense loyalty but also intense fury, especially after running a presidential campaign two years ago that split the political left right down the middle. Nader is nothing if not a tightly wrapped bundle of contradictions, all of which simply makes him so intriguing. The public Nader is well known, but the private Ralph is exactly that, very private. Which naturally causes someone like me to ask the question: just what makes this guy tick?

In truth, we'll probably never know the whole Nader, which only makes a biography such as this all the more interesting. The author had thorough access to both Nader himself as well as lots of his allies, ex-allies, family members and others who were associated with or interacted with him over the years, yet, despite all this, the author, at the end of the day, seems to find the man as much an enigma as when he started this project. The reader is left to read between the lines and in the process form his own conclusions. And my own go along the following: first, it's my theory that Nader is hard to peg down because he is a leading member of a group that's never been formally identified, a group I'll call Political Fundamentalists. Much like their counterparts on the Right (the Religious Fundamentalists), the Political Fundamentalists possess an overwhelming sense of the rightness of their ideology. They are, in this world of all-around relativism, political True Believers for whom terms like "negotiate" and "give and take" simply don't exist in their lexicon and "compromise" is a dirty word. As a result, on the one hand, these type people tend to achieve their agenda as a result of pure, bulldog determination. They simply allow nothing to get in their way because, to them, it's not just one set of values competing against others in the political arena, but rather a clash between absolute good versus absolute evil. This, as the book points out with many examples, is largely the secret behind Nader's influence and clout, especially in his "glory years" that started in the mid 60's and reached a peak in the mid 70's. But, as numerous other examples given here show, it also resulted in Nader having as his own worst enemy none other than himself. Too often his determination simply became dogmatism, which caused him to pick too many fights with potential allies because they had, in his estimation strayed from the Righteous Path.

Nowhere was this more evident than in his quixotic 2000 campaign. On the one hand, his motivations seemed quite sincere; he really did believe that the Democrats had become much too similar to the GOP and that his Green Party offered a real alternative. On the other hand, the author makes a good case that Nader not only felt Gore had "sold out", but furthermore, he seemed to detest the man on a personal and visceral level. To a Fundamentalist, heathens and pagans can be partly excused on account of their presumed ignorance of the True Faith, but Gore was a heretic, an apostate who had rejected The Way in favor of pragmatism and worldly success. He seemed to revel in waving his "spoiler" status in Gore's face, actively campaigning right up to the last in highly competitive states, and to this day, he remains utterly unrepentant of the incontrovertible fact that he, far more than the "butterfly ballot" or anything else, cost him the election. On the one hand, this sense of Olympian detachment, of indifference to the intense fire he came under, has a certain admirable quality to it. In an era chock full of spin-doctors and political hacks, Nader was the Real Deal. But, on the other hand, one senses a man so full of himself that he had lost sight of the difference between taking a principled stand and self-righteous egomania.

So much for the "public" Nader. It may sound clichéd, but if you understand what motivates Jerry Falwell, you pretty much understand Nader as well. The absolutism, the devotion to fundamental ideology is basically the same, never mind the differences in their specific beliefs. But what about the private Ralph? This is a much more interesting nut (pun intended) to crack. The political Left is generally thought to be the realm of hedonists and libertines, men and women who flout traditional mores concerning things like sex and drug use. Nader is the exact opposite, a modern day ascetic, a Harry Hairshirt whose rejection of the pleasures of the flesh is a notable part of his legend. It would seem that not once have his lips touched either women or liquor, nor (God forbid!) tobacco. He has no car, nor much in the way of personal possessions beyond the bare necessities. He does not seem to have any hobbies or any other forms of recreation. He does not take vacations or travel for pleasure. In fact, among the 6 billion or so humans alive on this planet, he alone seems to have no interest (or even capacity) to enjoy life. That is perhaps the core of what makes Nader so fascinating. This is a man who has never fallen in love, who exists in a world full of beauty and wonder yet who sees none of it because he lives only for The Cause, like some dutiful soldier he grimly presses on, year after year, no matter what obstacles come his way. How can a person live like this? Perhaps, like some early Christian martyr, his beliefs are simply much more important. Or perhaps it's due to some psychological quirk, something that has created a desert in his soul and made it a dry, harsh place where there simply is no room for pleasure, for simply enjoying being alive. Whatever it is, it is an enigma that Nader is not about to share with anyone (as is his right) and one he'll undoubtedly take to his grave.