Author in Chief

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.