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Patriot's History® Of The Modern World, Vol. II: From The Cold War To The Age Of Entitlement, 1945-2012 (2013)

by Larry Schweikart(Favorite Author)

3.41 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Sentinel

review 1: The book claims to cover 1945-2012. The word for that is ambitious. Ambition is not necessarily a bad thing but this book is not successful. I cannot deny that there were successful sections. Overall however the book seems to pick and choose certain events to focus and certain points to frame their context. For example the civil rights movement was given 4 pages while a 60 page chapter was devoted to "Sex by Consent, Beauty by Consensus".
review 2: The main driving point to this work is the power of American exceptionalism and how its decline within the American consciousness has led to a material decline not only within the U.S. itself, but also around the world (the latter having lost the guiding light of the former). What this line of thinking seemingly ign... moreores, however, is the inherent problem with such "we have it right, and everyone else has it wrong" mentality, particularly when applied to overt political thinking. Some very similar cases, including the former Yugoslavia, the former USSR (to some degree, anyway), Rwanda, and the Koreas, among others, are railed against for their ultra-nationalism and misguided political myopia, while the same ideas are being promoted by the authors with respect to the US. Making matters worse are the mis-conflations of terms by the authors (apparently communism and socialism are the same things, as are other pairs), their straight demonization of both communism (in general and as the particular political ideology espoused by the Soviet Union) and "liberal"/"progressive" ideologies, and the inconsistencies of many of their arguments (for example, communist infiltration into the American government and populace was a huge threat, despite the fact that popular acceptance of communist policy was minimal to say the least and the apparent near-hijacking of the government by foreign agents didn't really do much to help their Soviet handlers all that much, given how the Cold War panned out). Ultimately, it was obvious from the title and subtitle that this was going to be a heavily slanted and ideologically-centered work, but it was more saddening to see the authors' blindness to their own inconsistencies than it was to be preached at by nostalgia-goggled, everything-was-so-much-better-back-in-the-day-and-today-is-the-beginning-of-the-end-times ideologues. Let's all agree to disagree, but let's not think that everything is going to fall to pieces if we're not listened to, shall we? If nothing else, this work does in fact highlight the fact that History (with a capital H) is beyond the reach of human minds: This is "A...History" of the time period, not THE history, thus allowing for other (potentially competing/antithetical) interpretations of the same events/sources. So there's that... less

Download links for: Patriot's History® of the Modern World, Vol. II: From the Cold War to the Age of Entitlement, 1945-2012

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