Reagan
His Life and Legend
Format:Hardback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Published:11th Oct '24
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From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained an enigma—a man of profound contradictions—even to those closest to him. Believing that this inscrutability contributed to Reagan’s appeal, Max Boot sought to reveal the real man behind the mythology. Drawing on more than a hundred new interviews and thousands of newly available documents, Reagan tells the epic story of the Depression-era poor boy who transfixed and transformed the nation. Yet Boot, a one-time Republican policy advisor, offers no apologia, depicting a man with a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing. Providing revelatory insights into “trickle-down economics”, the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.
"[I]mpeccably researched and thoroughly compelling… thanks to Boot’s enormously readable and scrupulously honest book, we know more than ever before about this complicated, frustrating and yet oddly magnetic man." -- Dominic Sandbrook - The Sunday Times
"Intelligent, elegant and engrossing" -- Andrew Preston - Literary Review
"[Reagan’s] remoteness has frustrated previous biographers. But Mr Boot responds with doggedness, evoking Reagan’s early life in small-town Illinois, college years and early forays into politics. Mr Boot is a gifted enough writer to prevent this accretion of detail from becoming a slog, and Reagan’s apparent lack of an inner life becomes a benefit: it keeps the focus on Reagan’s actions, which matter far more than a politician’s thoughts or feelings." -- The Economist
"[A] generous yet sharply perceptive biography" -- Peter Conrad - The Observer
"[Reagan] aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account." -- Daniel Immerwahr - The New Yorker
"A judicious biography. " -- Jacob Heilbrunn - The New York Times
"[A] magisterial new biography… The first important Reagan biography of the post-Reagan era" -- Geoffrey Kabaservice - The Washington Post
"[A] readable and insightful biography" -- Philip Johnston - The Telegraph
"This is a timely and fascinating book, just what we need to understand, and perhaps transcend, our current age of political paralysis and polarization. Understanding Reagan is key to understanding our politics today." -- Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
"This comprehensive biography—relying on a decade of research, unearthed records, and revealing interviews—separates man from myth, offering a compelling and clear-eyed portrait of this consequential president and the country he shaped." -- Karen Tumulty, author of The Triumph of Nancy Reagan
"a new and masterly biography of Ronald Reagan" -- William Hague - The Times
ISBN: 9780871409447
Dimensions: 244mm x 165mm x 46mm
Weight: 1259g
880 pages