Monday, December 22, 2008

THANK GOD FOR THE HARD HATS: Comes a time every year -- and this may be a little tardy, but you're industrious -- when we recommend recent fiction and nonfiction books pertaining to this site's themes (or not) for your holiday gift-giving and reading. Along those lines, I'll again commend to you Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution, about which I've written previously, which surveys the five films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1967, a moment which reflected and furthered the shift away from the studio system and towards independent, more personal, youth-oriented films.

Something of a bookend to that, though I hadn't recognized this before, is Nixonland by my friend Rick Perlstein, about which I probably don't need to say too much at this point given that it's made just about every top-ten year end list from The Economist to Entertainment Weekly. The cultural revolution reflected by films like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde led to a backlash from the squares which Richard Nixon recognized and shrewdly capitalized upon, turning a nation that voted 60-40 for LBJ over Goldwater in 1964 to a 60-40 Nixon rout of McGovern eight years later. It's a political history and a cultural one as well, and if you appreciate this excerpt, you ought to read the whole thing.

What books of 2008 do you recommend?

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