'The Age of Reagan' by Sean Wilentz
BOOK REVIEW
Wilentz puts the Reagan era -- which he sees as a time of political polarization and power struggle -- into historical context.
The Age
of Reagan
A History,
1974-2008
Sean Wilentz
Harper:
564 pp., $27.95
THE GENRE of "instant history" has attracted -- and often defeated -- many able writers at least since "Only Yesterday," Frederick Lewis Allen's stylish 1931 chronicle of the 1920s. Back then, Allen could merrily shrug off sources and subjects he omitted or overlooked. In contrast, today's practitioners of recent history need only boot up to confront a galaxy of data on an infinity of topics -- nagging reminders of how much we don't know and never will. Chronicles of our own yesterdays tend to bloat and sag, lacking clear organizing principles. They read like someone dumped 20 years of Newsweeks on your doorstep.
Not so "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008," the latest effort to squeeze the rearview-mirror past between two covers. Its author is Sean Wilentz, professor of history at Princeton, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning "The Rise of American Democracy" (2005) and public intellectual par excellence. Long known in academia for "Chants Democratic" (1984), his seminal work on 19th century working-class radicalism, Wilentz has earned a wide following with his virtuosic review-essays in the New Republic and elsewhere, and most recently with his fearless op-ed writing -- emerging this year as a rare skeptic of the Obamamania that has gripped the left-leaning (male) intelligentsia.
Wilentz handles the superabundance of sources confronting modern Frederick Lewis Allens by turning mainly to the stacks of previously published material on his subject, including key primary sources such as Ronald Reagan's diaries and the Iran-Contra report. He doesn't flinch from stating that he "did not conduct a single interview in connection with this book." Notwithstanding his subtitle's chronological claims, he eases his task by confining his treatment of the current administration to a 25-page epilogue, thus skirting the perils of the "instant" in instant history.
Most important, Wilentz focuses, with an admirable lack of defensiveness, on presidential politics. "I have not been motivated by a wish to discover the deep cultural, economic, social, or psychological factors that might explain recent political history," he declares. ". . . . I want instead to provide a fresh, succinct, and accessible chronicle of American history, focused on political history, after 1974." Engrossing, provocative and destined to be influential, "The Age of Reagan" fully succeeds in that mission.
