Morning in America

I thoroughly enjoyed every single chapter of Morning in America! Gil Troy has written a wonderful book: important, full of fresh insights, and fun to read. I especially like how he weaves the cultural phenomena of the time with Reagan's personal qualities and influence, showing how Reagan was affected by the culture around him and how he changed it. -- Lesley Stahl, Correspondent, "60 Minutes" Bravo! Gil Troy's readable, entertaining, and compelling book does a masterful job of capturing the challenges Ronald Reagan and I faced in office. This superb book's original insight into the linkage between politics and culture not only explains what happened during Reagan's presidency and the 1980s, it offers essential insight into the continuing debates about the key challenges facing North Americans today. -- The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Former Prime Minister of Canada Lively and insightful; will equally fascinate admirers and detractors of the Reagan presidency. -- David Frum, author of "How We Got Here: The 70s--The Decade That Brought You Modern Life" This fast-paced, consistently readable book successfully combines two difficult tasks. It is at once a first-rate interpretive presidential history and a stimulating exposition of the culture of the 1980s. Troy has given us a sweeping, balanced--and indispensable--account of the Reagan Era. -- Alonzo L. Hamby, Ohio University, author of "For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s" This remarkable book is well structured, replete with insight and fresh interpretations, nuanced, and written with verve and passion. Reading it was both thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly informative. -- Bruce Schulman, Boston University, author of "The Seventies"

Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counter revolution that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers and his detractors, is often "yes." This work covers Ronald Reagan's legacy taking us through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters.Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counterrevolution that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers and his detractors, is often "yes." In Morning in America, Gil Troy argues that the Great Communicator was also the Great Conciliator. His pioneering and lively reassessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy takes us through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters, integrating the story of the Reagan presidency with stories of the decade's cultural icons and watershed moments-from personalities to popular television shows. One such watershed moment was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With the trauma of Vietnam fading, the triumph of America's 1983 invasion of tiny Grenada still fresh, and a reviving economy, Americans geared up for a festival of international harmony that-spurred on by an entertainment-focused news media, corporate sponsors, and the President himself-became a celebration of the good old U.S.A. At the Games' opening, Reagan presided over a thousand-voice choir, a 750-member marching band, and a 90,000-strong teary-eyed audience singing "America the Beautiful!" while waving thousands of flags. Reagan emerges more as happy warrior than angry ideologue, as a big-picture man better at setting America's mood than implementing his program. With a vigorous Democratic opposition, Reagan's own affability, and other limiting factors, the eighties were less counterrevolutionary than many believe. Many sixties' innovations went mainstream, from civil rights to feminism. Reagan fostered a political culture centered on individualism and consumption-finding common ground between the right and the left. Written with verve, Morning in America is both a major new look at one of America's most influential modern-day presidents and the definitive story of a decade that continues to shape our times.