The college dropout who organized rock’s most famous festival “points no accusatory fingers” when recounting how it got out of control, said George Ducker in the Los Angeles Times. Mostly, Michael Lang savors the memories in “easygoing fashion,” while co-author Holly George-Warren rounds up recollections from Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia, and others who help “boil the business of the festival down to its human core.”
Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year
by Sir Alistair Horne
(Simon & Schuster, $30)
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British historian Alistair Horne is sympathetic to Henry Kissinger’s perspective but does not “give us a hagiography” of the man, said Jacob Heilbrunn in The New York Times. His “penetrating and mostly reliable” assessment of President Nixon’s longtime secretary of state deals even-handedly with Kissinger’s diplomacy during the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. His most “astute” analysis, however, describes how Kissinger’s desire for nuclear détente provoked a “revolt from the Right,” which would be led by upstart Republican Ronald Reagan.
Go Like Hell
by A.J. Baime
(Houghton Mifflin, $26)
Three decades ago, auto racing was a “brawny, bloody affair” and few thought a Ford could compete with a Ferrari at Le Mans in France, said Michael Merschel in The Dallas Morning News. Hard-charging Henry Ford II finally proved them wrong in 1966, and A.J. Baime makes the battle worth revisiting. “A streamlined marvel,” Go Like Hell will “elicit happy grins from anyone who has ever heard music in the squeal of a tire.”
What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?
by Kevin Mattson
(Bloomsbury, $25)
Conventional wisdom holds that Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech “doomed his re-election chances,” said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. Historian Kevin Mattson contends that the president’s prescription for solving the economically strapped country’s “crisis of confidence” in fact should be lauded as a prescient and “brave attempt to reimagine the nation.” But the author wrongly blames the press for the perception that Carter had “blown it.” He’d made other erratic decisions, such as firing his Cabinet.
