Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Mediocre White Men

The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding in His Times by Francis Russell

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For the last few years, I’ve had a curiosity about Warren Harding. While he was an unexceptional president, he apparently lived a very…shall we say…interesting social life. He also presided over the Teapot Dome Scandal, probably the biggest political scandal until Watergate, and his death was shrouded in mystery. When I read that James Ellroy once considered writing a fictional DC quartet with this book as a guide…well I had to get my hands on it. Holy crap was this bad. It’s tough to tell […]

More American Leadership

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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This book was a birthday gift from my sister last year and I loved it. I previously read Team of Rivals which deserves every word of praise it garners so I was excited to read another book by DKG. This book highlights four different American presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. DKG points out that she is only focusing on LBJ’s civil rights policies, and avoiding his handling of the Vietnam War. I also learned that DKG was an intern for […]

Learn about your different voices

I Am Kind: A Little Book about Abraham Lincoln by Brad Meltzer

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I Am Kind: A Little Book about Abraham Lincoln talks about the personality of Lincoln with the backdrop of being kind (a trait he was known for) as the moral to the story. And while being kind is a subject or moral for all ages to learn, the overall feeling of the book (the fact that it is being told by the point of view of Lincoln and dealing with in simple terms, the personality and events of Lincoln) seems a bit mature for the […]

America was born in the crucible of the civil war, and Ulysses Grant was the avatar for its renewed life.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S. Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands

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This was a marvelous biography of an iconic American who’s life coincided with some of the most tumultuous and divisive events in American history. But I find myself struggling to review it. H.W. Brands doesn’t skimp on the details. His Ronald Regan biography tips the scales with more than 800 pages. His book on FDR is even more ambitious, being close to 900 pages – though, when you consider that FDR had nearly twice as much time in office as Regan, it may be said […]

Great expectations brought low

An Honest President by H. Paul Jeffers

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I don’t know who has written the book on Grover Cleveland, but I don’t think this book is it. It’s an insightful appraisal of the man, and an informative snapshot of the era, but it isn’t nearly detailed enough in the latter respect to be able to draw much of a parallel to current affairs, and the subject perhaps isn’t interesting enough to safe the former respect. I liked the book, but it’s a fairly middling biography, for a president often ignored and little taught […]



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