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inhaledmocha's review against another edition
challenging
informative
tense
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Xenophobia
Moderate: Medical content
shadowrocks8's review against another edition
dark
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Essential primer for understanding Watergate
mattmclean's review against another edition
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.5
Not a 5/5 because that is reserved for life-changing books. Not a 4.75/5 because i just wish after so many confusing plots, the author did a short wrap up of what we did know for fact and what was left unanswered at the end. Nonetheless, great book! Easy to read. Funny at parts. All the information you could want on watergate is here and it is digestible and in a structure that makes sense. I def recommend this to anyone who is new to the watergate break in because you don't need to know any information prior to picking up this book.
nordstina's review against another edition
4.0
Garrett Graff is a fantastic non-fiction writer (I loved his 9/11 oral history) and his telling of the Watergate saga was quite readable considering the amount of detail he goes into. It was a timely read, starting it just after SCOTUS arrived at its presidential immunity ruling and thinking how times of changed from Nixon. There are so many characters (white men, hah) in this book it was at times hard to keep track of how they all related to one another, but this book gave me a much wider perspective on Watergate, which I only knew broad shades of. It's dense, but pretty approachable.
lesserjoke's review against another edition
4.0
This 2022 publication is a clear and exceedingly thorough account of the various misdeeds, investigations, and cover-ups that dogged the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff has conducted no fresh interviews -- which would not necessarily be possible or even all that helpful nearly a half-century after the fact -- but he has read and synthesized an extraordinary volume of the existing primary and secondary materials, much of which had apparently never been collected together into one place before.
(As always, it's difficult to adequately rate / review a nonfiction title without being an expert on the subject oneself. But the obvious level of scholarship and the degree to which the author points out errors and inconsistencies in earlier reporting leads me to believe he's been careful about researching and presenting the facts himself. It also reads as objective and nonpartisan, although that's presumably easier for a modern writer to achieve than a contemporary one.)
While the ensuing work is heavy on information both available at the time and in some cases revealed only decades later, it paints a vivid sense of the confusing miasma of scandal and corruption swirling around the Nixon campaign and White House, where one crisis and its illegal, unethical response would often blend seamlessly into the next. Graff pointedly avoids drawing the comparison himself, but the atmosphere will surely seem familiar to younger readers like me who have no firsthand memories of the Watergate era but did follow political news over the Trump years, which in many ways traced a similar pattern.
There are no revelations or new conclusions in this book, but there are plenty of items that had been previously lacking from my general pop-cultural understanding of this moment in American history. Like that the president probably wasn't initially aware of the hotel burglary that eventually became emblematic of his downfall; he had just encouraged such a corrupt culture among his staff that enterprising underlings would routinely attempt such criminal acts of their own volition. (Regardless, he still knew about and tried to hide the affair soon afterward, and was more directly responsible for other offenses from money laundering to blackmail.) Or that there's still no agreement on what the point of the Watergate break-in even was, or that Nixon and his team knew the identity of the infamous 'Deep Throat' leaker to Woodward and Bernstein pretty much right from the start.
All in all it's a hefty tome, some 832 pages in hardcover, but it's well worth reading for the deep dive into its chosen topic. I look forward to someday seeing a book like this on the Trump administration, when all the dust has finally settled.
[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and antisemitism.]
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(As always, it's difficult to adequately rate / review a nonfiction title without being an expert on the subject oneself. But the obvious level of scholarship and the degree to which the author points out errors and inconsistencies in earlier reporting leads me to believe he's been careful about researching and presenting the facts himself. It also reads as objective and nonpartisan, although that's presumably easier for a modern writer to achieve than a contemporary one.)
While the ensuing work is heavy on information both available at the time and in some cases revealed only decades later, it paints a vivid sense of the confusing miasma of scandal and corruption swirling around the Nixon campaign and White House, where one crisis and its illegal, unethical response would often blend seamlessly into the next. Graff pointedly avoids drawing the comparison himself, but the atmosphere will surely seem familiar to younger readers like me who have no firsthand memories of the Watergate era but did follow political news over the Trump years, which in many ways traced a similar pattern.
There are no revelations or new conclusions in this book, but there are plenty of items that had been previously lacking from my general pop-cultural understanding of this moment in American history. Like that the president probably wasn't initially aware of the hotel burglary that eventually became emblematic of his downfall; he had just encouraged such a corrupt culture among his staff that enterprising underlings would routinely attempt such criminal acts of their own volition. (Regardless, he still knew about and tried to hide the affair soon afterward, and was more directly responsible for other offenses from money laundering to blackmail.) Or that there's still no agreement on what the point of the Watergate break-in even was, or that Nixon and his team knew the identity of the infamous 'Deep Throat' leaker to Woodward and Bernstein pretty much right from the start.
All in all it's a hefty tome, some 832 pages in hardcover, but it's well worth reading for the deep dive into its chosen topic. I look forward to someday seeing a book like this on the Trump administration, when all the dust has finally settled.
[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and antisemitism.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog
rusty_shackleford_'s review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
5.0