Before the storm (2001)

Goldwater's defeat, 1964 The one book here written decades after the fact, and it earns its place because it takes the losing side seriously. Perlstein follows the conservative activists who won the Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater, then the landslide defeat, and argues that 1964 was a turning point whose aftershocks American politics still feels. It is history rather than reporting, drawn from archives and interviews rather than a seat on the plane, so it trades immediacy for hindsight and runs to more than 600 pages. It won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was Perlstein's first book; his later volumes, starting with Nixonland, carry the story forward.