![]() And yet by its very nature, this first volume, which covers McGovern's life from his boyhood in small-town South Dakota during the Great Depression to his surprising insurgent performance at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, is necessarily more the study of a man than a statesman McGovern's historically quixotic 1972 presidential campaign, hamstrung at the time by McGovern's choice of deeply problematic Senator Tom Eagleton as his running mate now all but lost the dolorous memory of Richard Nixon's subsequent landslide victory, is still on the distant horizon when The Rise of a Prairie Statesman comes to an end.McGovern led such a colorful early life, and Knock is such a skilled and easily eloquent storyteller, that readers won't care in the slightest that this book is a 500-page first part rather than a 1000-page behemoth complete biography. KnockPrinceton University Press, 2016Considering the incredibly long and deep shadow George McGovern has cast over the last half-century of Democratic politics, a book like Thomas Knock's new The Rise of a Prairie Statesman (the first volume in projected two-volume “Life and Times”) feels long overdue. The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovernby Thomas J. ![]()
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