Reviews for Return to these hills

The average rating for Return to these hills based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-25 00:00:00 Ardyn Nordstrom “Reagan’s America” was a hard book to finish because my unanticipated disgust accumulated to a nearly intolerable degree, yet I should have read it immediately upon its publication in 1987. Radio talk show hosts extol Ronald Reagan’s presidency to no end, but in all he did before then he was a sleazy sellout, according to this persuasive analysis. Gary Wills does a fine job of explaining what it meant to be raised in the Disciples of Christ, to attend Eureka College, to live in the Mississippi River basin, to go to Hollywood and get involved in the actor’s union, to become California governor. Historical and philosophical factors were at play. Reagan said he grew up in Huck Finn’s world, but Wills reminds there was a dark side to that story, one Reagan ignored. He routinely disregarded facts and let himself believe whatever he wanted. His father was Mr. Pious Sales Job, and it wore off on the son. “Reagan is a joiner, a cheerleader, the ‘best friend,’ not a maverick, not an independent thinker. His virtues are those of the community, of going along to get along. He is reliable rather than innovative. That is his real strength, despite his own misleading praise of enterprise, entrepreneurial risk, difference, competition, and individualism.” Whatever myth was handed down very well suited the lifeguard and frat boy and studio contract actor and company man who viewed himself as a nonconformist. When he got to Sacramento, it was a big mess and cronies cashed in all around him. When he got to Washington, conflicts of interest abounded. Meanwhile, despite his promises to make cuts, his administration increased spending in the first term and “added as much to the national debt in those four years as had been accumulated in our national history to that point…” But Reagan sold American values, and we were buying. “He is the sincerest claimant to a heritage that never existed, a perfect blend of an authentic America he grew up in and of that America’s own fables about it’s past.” As president, his primary usefulness was as the mascot for our own dreams and desires.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-25 00:00:00 Luis Martorell This book employs a biographical account of Ronald Reagan's life through his first term as president to make some serious points about American culture, particularly its habits and tendencies of no-nothingism as when, again and again, citizens go to the polls and vote against their own interests--Reagan's own election being a case in point. The method of the narrative is to chronologically compare and contrast Reagan's own account of something, often his own life, with the actual facts. In this, whether describing his college career or the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan's accounts often bear only the faintest of family resemblances to the matter at hand. Yet Reagan's incapacity to be correct and apparent disinterest in so doing are not presented by Wills as predicated upon some moral or intellectual flaw. He neither treats Reagan as an unethical manipulator nor as a dunce. In virtually all cases he gives the man the benefit of the doubt, maintaining that Reagan was for the most part sincerely in earnest, his truths having little to do with facts except insofar, perhaps, as a Jamesian will to believe can create facts (the primary case of this being Wills' exposition of his administration's selling of supply-side economics). The point Will aims for is to explore how Reagan's delusions and illusions reflect misconceptions held dear by a large number of Americans, enough of them to twice elect the great storyteller as their primary representative, enough perhaps to characterize the nation--a point which he neatly associates with religious belief at both the outset and in his conclusion. The point being taken, this is not to neglect what may actually be the bulk of the book, this being a host of excursions into little histories of such things as the colleges of the Disciples of Christ, of the railroads, of gun ownership, of baseball, of the WPA, of radio, of television, of film, of Hollywood itself--all of which are themselves highly entertaining.