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Looking Back (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – February 29, 2004
Profiled here are presidents (Lyndon Johnson feuding with Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in his grasping, spectral exile), would-be presidents (Eugene V. Debs and Barry Goldwater, “gentlemen fallen among brutes”), and those who set their sights on something besides the presidency (Joe DiMaggio, and Martin Luther King, “the one indisputably great American of the century’s second half”).
Undeluded by the roar of what he calls “our national engines of ballyhoo, bushwah, and baloney,” Russell Baker reflects on the strange fascination that these larger-than-life characters have held for the American imagination. With an elegiac yet shrewd sense of their accomplishments both enduring and ephemeral, he traces the impressions they left on twentieth-century America—and on him.
- Print length212 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew York Review Books
- Publication dateFebruary 29, 2004
- Dimensions5.1 x 0.61 x 7.95 inches
- ISBN-101590170881
- ISBN-13978-1590170885
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Editorial Reviews
Review
— Tampa Tribune & Times
"[Baker displays] an unflinching desire to observe lives as they were actually lived, not as they were created by Hollywood."
— The Boston Globe
"Baker wrote wonderfully, with perfect, witty sentences that could make you stop and read them again."
— The Boston Globe
"[Baker has] scholarly erudition, stylistic flair, and an ability to sweep through all manner of culture high and low that recalls writers like Edmund Wilson and George Orwell."
— Boston Phoenix
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Product details
- Publisher : New York Review Books (February 29, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 212 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1590170881
- ISBN-13 : 978-1590170885
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 0.61 x 7.95 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,565,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #95,848 in United States History (Books)
- #128,453 in Social Sciences (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Charlotte Landis



