Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush

Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush | Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, ... | Facinating! informative!

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Character Above Al...

	Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, ... Simon & Schuster, 1996 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews
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highly recommended

Informative, entertaining, worth rereading many times

We all have a book or two that's a favorite; one you cherish a bit more than others. This book is that kind for me. Studying our country's presidents is a hobby of mine so I snatched this title up at the local bookstore a few years ago. Even today, I still read specific sections about any one of the Presidents from FDR to George Bush. This is the perfect book for your summer reading list. You'll get the insights into each President that never appears on the evening news. An excellent book!

Facinating! informative!

As the title implies, this is a collection of biographcial essays on each of the 10 presidents from FDR to Bush 1 by 10 different authors who are either expert historians or knew the President while in office. The thing that ties them all together is that each essay is supposed to look at each man as president and find that one part of his character that made him the type of president he was. Each essay is about 30 pages and it makes for interesting reading.

A good sample would come from Doris Kearns Goodwin's look at Franklin Roosevelt. She asserts that the most valuable component of his personality was his self-confidence. I thought this quote from FDR makes the point wonderfully: "I'll tell you...at night when I lay my head on my pilow, and it is often pretty late, and I think of the things that have come before me during the day and the decisions that I have made, I say to myself - well, I have done the best that I could, and turn over and go to sleep."

The essays are wonderful - some inspiring, such as Gerald Ford's, some disturbing such as JFK's. However, all are well-written and this is a fantastic collection. I give this book an: "A+".

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mistake, I believe

You have 'Character Above All' listed under the writings of Robert Anton Wilson. I believe this is incorrect.

Excellent writing and interesting insight

Some of the best biographers/historians/speech writers put together one very well written book. My favorites were McCullough's Truman piece, Doris Kearns' FDR section, Ambrose's Ike selection, and the section on Carter. While most of the authors are a bit biased towards their president/topic, they write well and make many good points. The book is a fast read. Noonan's piece on Reagan, also incredibly well written, simply bipasses the Iran-contra scandal with but a mention of what Reagan tried to do for the Contras. That is all well and good but it is difficult to read something about a president's character and the biggest scandal of that president's administration is conveniently left out. That would be like discussing Nixon's character and never bringing up Watergate or mentioning Clinton and not the Lewinski scandal. Fact is, those events are integral parts of a president's tenure. Such is life; still incredibly fun to read.

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Summaries of ten recent Presidents.

This is a composite book from ten different authors about ten different Presidents. Since these are all well known authors, the writers know their subjects and boil their personalities down in twenty to thirty pages. One cannot get more well known than David McCullough and Steven Ambrose. The writing is great and flows well.
If I have any problem, it is that some of the authors are more generous than others. Reeves makes Kennedy look pretty low on the morality issue and Noonan inflates Reagan a little too much. Of course, this is subjective writing, and since the authors know their subjects well, one can probably count on some bias. All in all a great read on some of our more recent Presidents, with the exception of Clinton and Bush II.

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