As has been said so often in this community, Warren Harding's ranking as one of the worst US Presidents is probably undeserved. He was a much better man and a much better President than history gives him credit for. Author Ryan S. Walters agrees, and this is the purpose and theme of his 2022 work The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding. ( Read more... )

History is written by the victors, as author Irwin Gellman reminds us in Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon and the Election of 1960, this year's first substantive book in the presidential history genre. Many of the most iconic accounts of the 1960 US Presidential election and of the Kennedy legend (such as Theodore White's classic "The Making ( Read more... )

Usually at this time of year, we look back on the many presidential biographies and histories that were read and reviewed in the past 12 months. Unfortunately, the past 12 months resulted in little in the way of personal reading, not necessarily because of a lack of good books or good authors, but because of a number of personal transitions, ( Read more... )

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University in New York. She previously served as the Chief Economist for the US Senate Budget Committee and has served as an advisor to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. She is also one of the leading proponents of MMT (modern monetary theory), described as a ( Read more... )

Bob Woodward will forever be remembered as one of two Washington Post reports to break the Watergate scandal, and since then he has written twenty books about presidents and national politics. Robert Costa is also a Washington Post reporter with a background in television news journalism as well. Together they have written a superb chronicle of the ( Read more... )

A Return to Normalcy?: The 2020 Election that (Almost) Broke America is a compilation of essays performing a post mortem of 2020 United States Presidential Election as well as many of the other elections that followed in its wake, including those in the US Senate and House, Gubernatorial contests and even some of those in state houses. It is ( Read more... )

CNN anchor Jake Tapper follows up his 2018 novel The Hellfire Club (reviewed here in this community) with his latest work The Devil May Dance, the second mystery in the Charlie and Margaret Marder series. Congressman Charlie Marder and his brilliant wife Margaret are back. Eight years have passed since we last visited them. The former academic and ( Read more... )

Millard Fillmore is considered the least remembered President of the United States (an honor sometimes shared with Chester Alan Arthur). He is more often remembered as the punchline to a joke, such as when H. L. Mencken perpetrated what came to be known as the "bathtub hoax" or when the Kia Motor Company gave a faux tribute to Fillmore as part of ( Read more... )

In an era of cancel culture, the debate goes on among historians of how, in the present day, we judge the past lives of those who led the nation during the time when slavery was not only tolerated, but staunchly defended to a point where it would ultimately lead to civil war. Today the immorality of kidnapping human beings from other nations, ( Read more... )

One would think that 2020 would have offered an abundance of time for reading and yet for some reason, there weren't as many books reviewed in this community in the past 12 months as in other years. Personally I found myself reading a lot of books on subjects unrelated to this community and therefore fewer reviews were posted here. Still there were ( Read more... )