We spent April and May 2025 slowly working our way through Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). It is 750 pages of dense political history covering roughly 1965 to 1972 - from the Watts riots through Nixon's re-election - and it is the second book in Perlstein's four-volume history of American conservatism.

Full notes on the wiki: Nixonland.

What The Book Actually Is

The title is misleading. Nixonland is not really a biography of Richard Nixon. Nixon is the frame - his loss in 1960, his loss in 1962, his political resurrection, his 1968 victory …

We wrote about Peter Golenbock's Bums back in November 2022. That book is an oral history of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and one of its central characters is Walter O'Malley, the owner who moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. In Golenbock's telling, O'Malley is the villain of the story - the guy who ripped the heart out of Brooklyn for money.

Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley argues that story is incomplete, and in important ways just wrong. We read it in May 2025 and it changed our mind about several things. Full notes …

Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers by Peter Golenbock is exactly what it says on the tin. It is an oral history, which means the book is stitched together mostly out of firsthand accounts - players, managers, executives, sportswriters, and fans - with Golenbock providing just enough connective tissue to keep the timeline moving.

We read it in the fall of 2022 and it turned out to be one of the better baseball books we have picked up. Below are our notes, chapter by chapter.

The Setup

The Brooklyn Dodgers were, until 1957, one of the two National League teams …