The Making Of The President 1968 – Theodore H. White, 1969 ★★★★

There's A Riot Going On

That saying back in 1968, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” clearly didn’t apply where Theodore H. White was concerned. When it came to that year’s presidential election, he handed you the whole meteorological report.

White’s “Making Of The President” series was three books into its four-book run when this 1968 edition came out, at over 500 pages by far the fattest and most sprawling of them all. He goes on too long in several places, data maven that he was, but when he’s done filling you in on the election’s many twists and turns, you get a strong sense of living through one chaotic year, and of why it turned out the way it did.

Did the country really go through a period of dramatic ideological radicalization and come out of it electing Richard Nixon? Yes, and the two things were closely related. White, a genteel liberal himself, makes clear a candidate touting law and order had considerable appeal when cities were ablaze with riot and campuses under student siege.

The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852 ★★★½

Subjectivity Triumphs Over All

Unconventional people went by different names in different eras. In more recent history, they were known as “beatniks” or “hippies.” In the mid-1800s, they were known as something else: transcendentalists.

What they were transcending was wide-ranging and amorphous, but their commitment to living in a world free of conventions was clear. For them, nature was a source of truth more powerful than any human creed. Who cared about money or class when there was eternal beauty?

Nathaniel Hawthorne was for a time one of these seekers, making his home for a few months in a utopian community called Brook Farm just outside Boston. While his time there wasn’t long, its impact went deep enough to form the basis of perhaps his most personal novel.

Kings And Vikings – P. H. Sawyer, 1982 ★

Epic History Made Dull

It takes a class-A killjoy to take a true-life story as violent and bloodthirsty as that of the marauding Norseman of the early Dark Ages and turn it into a treatise on place name derivations and burial mound archeology. But that is what you get here.

P. H. Sawyer was a longtime authority on the history of the Vikings by the time he got around to writing this book. Whatever unique, bold insights he offered in his field had clearly been spun out by then in other books. Here, what’s left is a good deal of chaff, without a central thesis or even an organizing principle behind it.

This is a short book, but don’t let the size fool you. It’s a chore to read.