Montgomery County native Chris Matthews, former host of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, offers a firsthand account of the major political events of the last half-century in his new book, This Country: My Life in Politics and History, writes Charlotte Alter for The Washington Post.

These events are interspersed with snippets from his own life as he grew from a young Catholic boy in the Philadelphia region to a Peace Corps worker in Switzerland.

He also took on several staff positions in the Senate, White House, and the House leadership before finally making it big in the media. As he grew, the political world changed around him.

He went from watching the Kennedy/Nixon debate to grilling presidential candidates on MSNBC, he visited Berlin after the Berlin Wall fell, and was in South Africa at the end of apartheid.

And those are just some of the many momentous events he witnessed since 1970.

But whether there are any additional insights in the book on the important players that was not already available as part of the public domain is up to the reader to determine.

Read more about the book in The Washington Post.