Brands is a professor at the University of Texas, a prolific author and a two-time Pulitzer finalist. Reagan went out of his way to speak to the Russian people about faith in God and the religious nature of liberty.
A drama based on the life of Ronald Reagan, from his childhood to his time in the oval office. Yet Morris found his subject so confounding that — in a spectacularly misguided attempt to understand and explain Reagan — he rendered himself a fictional character, worked his way into Reagan’s life story and called the resulting book, “Dutch,” “an advance in biographical honesty.” Once described as “America’s Boswell,” Morris ended up as Reagan’s Ahab — driven mad by his mission to “strike through the mask,” as Melville’s accursed captain put it.Few authors since have dared reckon with Reagan’s life in full. Brands quotes a June 14, 1982, entry in which Reagan admits to sharing his advisers’ irritation with Al Haig, his contentious secretary of state: “It’s amazing how sound he can be on complex international matters,” Reagan writes, “but how utterly paranoid with regard to the people he must work with.” Often, though, Brands simply steps back and allows Reagan — who frequently conflated fact and fiction, and had trouble distinguishing movie plots from reality — to function as his own narrator. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.For a man who lived most of his life on camera, Ronald Reagan eludes focus. Brands makes clear that Reagan was, in many ways, a paradox: an “ideologist” who was open to compromise, even on taxes and federal spending; a reflexive optimist with a wide streak of “negativity”; a staunch anti-Communist whose policies toward the “evil empire” were, as Brands notes, mostly cautious, “pragmatic” and “nonjudgmental.”Like his subject, Brands appears happiest when he’s telling a story, and Reagan, of course, provides many excellent ones — from his good humor in the emergency room after being shot by John Hinckley in 1981 to his two-day-long negotiation with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, the prelude to a historic arms reduction agreement the following year. Brands’ biography, while comprehensive in Reagan’s life, is largely an insider’s account of Reagan’s presidency. In his personal relationships, he was unfailingly warm but rarely intimate. The life of Ronald Reagan has been examined from a range of angles, from the personal to the political, and everything in between. Reagan: The Life (Hardcover) By H. W. Brands. He even deftly points out Reagan’s decision to pursue radio as an audience over television after his two terms as governor of California, a decision that paid huge dividends of the national audience he reached. Become a Conservative Book Club VIP Member!Along with your FREE chapter you will also receive CBC's daily newsletter delivered directly to your email inbox. Considered against other biographies in its weight class — those mega-books to which the word “definitive” adheres as if by laws of physics — Brands’s account is peculiarly unambitious, overfull of pat and timeworn observations. In White House meetings, he was mostly silent, often leaving his aides to guess at (and feud over) his views.

His portrait of Reagan is fair-minded if fond; “Reagan” is free of the partisan ax-grinding and mostly free of the mythmaking that characterizes much of the Reagan bookshelf. And yet it happened, and Reagan’s life is one of the great stories in American history. Yet he was all the same an unknowable man — even to those nearest him. Aside from marquee memoirs by Michael Deaver, Donald Regan, George Shultz and other members of the Reagan staff and cabinet, Brands draws on very few books at all, and apparently even fewer primary documents — typically the biographer’s manna. We Value Your The affair would last a lifetime.” On the political power of Reagan’s jokes and anecdotes, he notes that “democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular.” It is counterintuitive to call an 800-page book superficial, but length does not equal depth.Brands, who holds an endowed chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin, shows a surprising indifference to the literature on his subject.