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Average rating3.7
“One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years” (The Wall Street Journal) and based on a decade of research and reporting—a delightful new window into the public and private lives America’s presidents as authors. Most Americans are familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet few can name the work that helped him win the presidency: his published collection of speeches entitled Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in secret to get his book ready for the 1860 election, tracking down newspaper transcripts, editing them carefully for fairness, and hunting for a printer who would meet his specifications. Political Debates sold fifty thousand copies—the rough equivalent of half a million books in today’s market—and it reveals something about Lincoln’s presidential ambitions. But it also reveals something about his heart and mind. When voters asked about his beliefs, Lincoln liked to point them to his book. In Craig Fehrman’s “original, illuminating, and entertaining” (Jon Meacham) work of history, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works. Presidential books have made an enormous impact on American history, catapulting their authors to the national stage and even turning key elections. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the first presidential book to influence a campaign, and John Adams’s Autobiography, the first score-settling presidential memoir, Author in Chief draws on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to cast fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders. We see Teddy Roosevelt as a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to write the book that would become a classic of American history. We see Reagan painstakingly revising Where’s the Rest of Me?, and Donald Trump negotiating the deal for The Art of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Alongside each of these authors, we also glimpse the everyday Americans who read them. “If you’re a history buff, a presidential trivia aficionado, or just a lover of American literary history, this book will transfix you, inform you, and surprise you” (The Seattle Review of Books).
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I'm not super big into political books, but I do like well-written history books on obscure topics. While the presidents are hardly obscure, looking at them through the lens of the books they left behind really lent this book something that kept me interested. I greatly enjoyed the look at the pre-1900s presidents, as this book contained a lot of interesting factoids and amusing anecdotes from even the earliest presidencies that I hadn't heard before. I also appreciated the care the author took in describing the tonal shift in why a president would write a book and also the shift in when a president would typically write one.
Where I started to lose interest (and it almost seemed like the author did too) was around the Kennedy administration on up. Rather than spending pages and pages on early lives and stories from growing up, the book's pace sped up dramatically. Several presidents were glossed over or not mentioned at all: neither of the Bushes were represented, Clinton received a brief nod of a few pages, and despite the last section being entitled Truman to Trump, the only mention of Trump was a reference to ‘The Art of the Deal' in a footnote. I understand perhaps glossing over the early lives of recent presidents as we probably already know most of their histories by heart, but I really felt like the last section was phoned in.
Disclaimer: I received a free ARC of this book through Goodreads Giveaways.