Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz.

The book agrees with the two theses:  American democracy is in peril and “democracy in America never fully existed in the first place … it has always been a national enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place.” Ganz then used the early 1990s to make his case, with mixed success,

The book gets off to a strong start, in the introduction,  when it argues that Reagan’s economic policies were nothing more than class warfare, designed to make the rich even richer, while the rest of the country was left behind.

The first chapter, on David Duke, was excellent. There was also plenty of good historical information on Louisiana to start off the chapter, and throughout it. A couple of chapters later, there was an accurate quote from a conservative magazine Chronicles, in February 1992 that admitted that liberals were “dead right” that “David Duke represents the logical culmination of the conservative resurgence of Ronald Reagan.”

While reading the first chapter, I was sure that this was going to be an A+ book, or at worst, an A. It is very rare that I come to that early conclusion and it doesn’t come to fruition. Unfortunately, this was one of those exceptions.

The rest of the book lived up to the promise of the beginning. There was a good discussion of Ross Perot’s business dealings and corruptions, although the eventual coverage of his presidential campaign wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The chapter on the LAP and the unrest in Los Angeles was the best part of the book, other than the David Duke material. But, it also served as a reminder that this author was very capable of writing excellent material, but just not on a consistent basis in this book.

This was not, by any standards, a bad book. It just wasn’t one that was able to live up to the promise that it showed early on. I have to give it a B. NetGalley and Goodreads require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 12, 2024.