(CNN) -- Rick Perlstein could have called his book "Paranoia."



Richard Nixon was "the guy who exploited these tensions to create a new kind of politics," says Rick Perlstein.



If Perlstein's history of the 1960s and early '70s in America has a throughline, it's mistrust. Parents don't trust their children. Enlisted men don't trust their officers. Blacks don't trust whites, Southerners don't trust Northerners, the Silent Majority doesn't trust the Intellectual Establishment, and -- soon enough -- nobody trusts the government.



And in the midst of it all was Richard Nixon: Red-baiter, former vice president, failed gubernatorial nominee, punch line, political strategist and president, a master at playing both sides to maintain his hold on power. In doing so, he provided a roadmap for his successors.



Hence Perlstein's actual title: "Nixonland" (Scribner).



"I'm fascinated with how Americans fight with each other," says Perlstein, 39, who was born the year Nixon took office. "And the '60s is the best, the most -- besides the Civil War, I can't think of a more dramatic canvas. And Nixon fits in as the guy who exploited these tensions to create a new kind of politics that we're still living with now."  Slideshow: What made the '60s the '60s »



Perlstein's book has earned rave reviews. In The Atlantic magazine, conservative writer Ross Douthat praised the author for "the rare gift of being able to weave social, political, and cultural history into a single seamless narrative." Newsweek's Evan Thomas called it "the best book written about the 1960s" in more than a quarter-century.



Perlstein says he's long had an obsession with the '60s -- which, in "Nixonland," start with the Democratic landslide of 1964 and end with the Nixon landslide of 1972. The author, now a senior fellow at the left-leaning Campaign for America's Future in Chicago, considers the book a sequel to his earlier work, a biography of Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement.



But "Nixonland" is as much a cultural history as a political chronicle; indeed, in the '60s the two were tightly enmeshed. The decade saw the full flower of youth culture, which was intertwined with Vietnam War protests, increasing drug use and distinctive music.



It also saw the rise of what Nixon, in a major 1969 speech, termed the "Silent Majority" -- older, more conservative Americans buffeted on all sides by change, taking refuge in the familiar.



Both groups had their pop culture heroes and touchstones, Perlstein observes.



"The generational divide went so deep as to form a fundamental argument about what was moral and what was immoral," Perlstein says. "This was how people lived in the world -- through popular culture and through politics. The two feed off each other."



Though the era is now remembered through the rosy lenses of the baby boomers, their parents -- the heart of the "Silent Majority" -- didn't look upon the culture so fondly. Many disdained the era's pop music, the most obvious expression of youth.



Moreover, some of the highest-rated TV specials of 1969 and 1970 were Bob Hope programs, Perlstein writes, and when a movie such as 1970's "Joe" came out -- about a hardhat who loathes the hippies -- many in the audience came to cheer for the hardhat.



Movies may have been the most revealing mirror of society. The rise of the youth culture coincided with the death of the studio system. Some of what emerged were films willing to show the grit and ugliness of the cities ("the cities" being a common euphemism for civic decline). "Midnight Cowboy" and "The French Connection," the Academy Awards' best pictures of 1969 and 1971 respectively, show a weary, cold New York crumbling under its residents' feet.



Television tiptoed more gingerly into the new age, Perlstein says. With just three networks
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