By the time you
read this article, the President’s day holiday will have past. However, this theme gives me the opportunity
to share with you some interesting books that have been published recently.
The first one that
caught my eye was: “9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to
Save Her,” by Brion McClanahan. When I
saw that title, I immediately asked, by whose perspective? What is the authors
leaning and biases, how did he choose the nine he did. As you read, you may be able to pick this
out. If you want to know, look him up on the Internet. I will not tell you who he writes about,
because this might keep you from picking it up, and reading it. You may not agree with everything he writes,
but I find it important to consider the arguments and make my own conclusions
on the basis of the information gleaned and other knowledge I bring to a
discussion. McClanahan provides notes
for each chapter about the president he is writing about. He also provides a bibliography and index. 
The next item is
“Dead Presidents: An American Adventure Into the Strange Deaths and Surprising
Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders,” by Brady Carlson. The author confesses to
us that he came to this subject about dead presidents while visiting a monument
at Oak Ridge in Springfield. For years
he was taken with the marble sarcophagus for President Lincoln. Growing up he thought everyone visited to be
inspired. He found out that many came to
be tourists not be inspired by these sites.
One time he visited this site he learned that Lincoln was not buried in
the sarcophagus, but was ten to twelve feet below.
This began his search to find out “how we, the ages, choose to remember
and memorialize our dead presidents. . . (p. 5). ” Carlson tells us that it is
not the most famous, but the “obscure or mediocre presidents, “that give us really
interesting stories of their circumstances in death” (p. 7). The author shares
that this book starts “where most stories about the presidents leave off” (ibid.).
Another book you
may not have seen is “1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History,” by Jay
Winik. This book is about how there were
so many challenges and war front issues in 1944 that Roosevelt faced. The front flap asks a few questions: “Was
winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or
would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? Then at the end of the book Winik
states that we are still asking these basic questions with the atrocities we
see around the world. He quotes Abraham Lincoln as stating, “We must think
anew, and act anew . . . . Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We – even
we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility” (p. 536). Then he asks
two questions in the last paragraph: “When will the Allies come? When will the
Americans come?” (ibid.).
Other great books
about presidents include: The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and
Theodore Roosevelt,” by Eric Burns; “Eisenhower: A Life,” by Paul Johnson;
“Jimmy Carter: A Full Life – Reflections at Ninety,” by Jimmy Carter; Reagan:
The Life,” by H.W. Brands; “Lady Bird and Lyndon,” by Betty Boyd Caroli; “The
Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789,” by Joseph
Ellis; “The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His
Decision that Changed American History,” by Jonathan Horn.
