A review by k80uva
Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 by Julian E. Zelizer, Kevin M. Kruse

3.0

I'm sorry to say I was a little lukewarm on this book. It's a fine overview and it's written clearly, which would make it a good book to teach from, but I was really struck by how closely the first 100 pages resemble Bruce Schulman's The Seventies, and the 1980s and 1990s parts are very similar to Gil Troy's "Morning in America" and "The Age of Clinton," as well as the CNN decade documentaries. It's not plagiarism, exactly, but it doesn't offer a new perspective and it actually felt a little too broad on the fault lines we're dealing with--it's focused on Democrats vs. Republicans, but there are other fault lines (populist vs. centrist, isolationist vs. internationalist, urban vs. rural) that are not really discussed in depth here.