Purchase
The Life
Doubleday
May 2015
On Sale: May 12, 2015
886 pages ISBN: 0385536399 EAN: 9780385536394 Kindle: B00NDTS7FU Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction Political
From master storyteller and New York Times bestselling
historian H. W. Brands comes the definitive biography of a
visionary and transformative president. In his magisterial new biography, H. W. Brands
brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two
great presidents of the twentieth century, a true peer to
Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how
the confident force of Reagan’s personality and the
unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a
conservative revolution in American politics and play a
crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan
shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered
in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still
powerfully felt today. Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for
ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town
Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that
quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie
star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the
voice of The General Electric Theater on television made him
an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began
Reagan’s improbable political ascension, starting in the
1960s, when he was first elected governor of California, and
culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the
United States. Employing archival sources not available to previous
biographers and drawing on dozens of interviews with
surviving members of Reagan’s administration, Brands has
crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative of the
presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagan’s
remote management style and fractious West Wing staff, his
deft handling of public sentiment to transform the tax code,
and his deeply misunderstood relationship with Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev, on which nothing less than the fate of
the world turned. Reagan is a storytelling triumph, an irresistible
portrait of an underestimated politician whose pragmatic
leadership and steadfast vision transformed the nation.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|