Reagan: The Life. By H.W. Brands. Doubleday; 805 pages; $35.
MORE than a decade after his death, Ronald Reagan still divides people. American conservatives revere him as practically a demigod. He shrank the state, rescued the economy and won the cold war; all Republican candidates must pay homage. The left dismisses him as malign and moronic—a B-movie actor who floated into the White House on an updraft of phoney charm, a man who snoozed during meetings, blew up the deficit and propped up unsavoury third-world despots from Argentina to Zaire.
The truth is more interesting than the caricature, and H.W. Brands’s new biography tells the story as well as you could ask for in a single volume. A lucid and witty writer, Mr Brands lays out the facts in short chapters that bounce along like one of the “bare-fisted walloping action” films that Reagan once starred in. He has a talent for letting his sources speak for themselves. They include not only politicians and Reagan himself, but also his children, who were as neglected as those of any famous parent. Invited to speak at his adopted son Michael’s boarding school,...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMwCh
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