leilatre's review against another edition
3.0
For a book that was about a single month in US history, this was a long read. The level of detail in the recounting of the several threads in the book is commendable, but it did feel like details were repeated more than was necessary and there were times when the book bogged down. It took me around a month to read, which seems too long. The last half of the book was more interesting to me than all the set-up in the first half.
Overall, interesting and substantively dense. I feel like I have a much better grasp on some of the workings of the Nixon administration which were always hazy to me at best. So it was a worthwhile read. The Epilogue tries to do too much, tracing Nixon's politics through Reagan and the modern era. I would have preferred just a tie-up of the threads of the story, as opposed to the author trying to put together an entire worldview for the reader to agree with or not.
Overall, interesting and substantively dense. I feel like I have a much better grasp on some of the workings of the Nixon administration which were always hazy to me at best. So it was a worthwhile read. The Epilogue tries to do too much, tracing Nixon's politics through Reagan and the modern era. I would have preferred just a tie-up of the threads of the story, as opposed to the author trying to put together an entire worldview for the reader to agree with or not.
johnnygamble's review
3.0
I think I may be done with books centering around years of history (1969, 1968, 1920, 1927, 1865 etc.) and added to that books about months within that year of history. It's not that they're not informative, they are. It's not that they're not well-written, although this one depended on verbatim prose too much. It's just the theses are forced, as if the phases of the earth around the sun, or the month around the earth, somehow forced the history.
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