Thumbing across America with John Waters

Love's possibilities unwrapped in French novel

Readers learn about Nixon and Reagan, sure, but also about the only-in-the-'70s phenomena like EST workshops, in which people paid $250 to have insults screamed at them. The account of John Dean's televised Watergate testimony includes both blow-by-blow details and a snippet from the commercial aired during the hearing for Final Net.

Reagan fans looking for a heroic tale will be disappointed. Perlstein's default mode is irreverence, and his Reagan is a storyteller who does not let the messy complexity of reality get in the way of simple answers. He calls the future president an "athlete of denial". Democrat Jimmy Carter fares no better here. Perlstein portrays him as an opportunistic candidate happy to tell people what they want to hear.

At more than 800 pages, the narrative bogs down during the Watergate hearings and in some other places. But the mini-biography of Reagan nestled in the pages is a page turner, as is Perlstein's climactic account of the nail-biter presidential nominating convention in 1976. Ford won the nomination but Reagan won the hearts of many Republicans who wondered if they had just launched the wrong candidate into the general election.

Even Reagan couldn't please everyone, though.

Perlstein writes that Goldwater, Mr Conservative himself, complained that Reagan had become "one of those people, the really ideological ones who won't change".