The most recommended Ronald Reagan books

Another forgotten book, Where’s the Rest of Me? covered Reagan’s early life and set him up for his post-Hollywood pivot. Reagan was always more literary than his opponents understood, and in this book he managed to define his sunny political image several years before his famous political aides showed up to help. I discovered this after finding a set of letters no other Reagan biographer had seen, but you could also see it just by reading his book’s opening, which is far too strange and memorable to get past a good flack:

The story begins with the close-up of a bottom in a small town called Tampico in Illinois, on February 6, 1911. My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that he was white.

The punch line: “Ever since my birth,” Reagan wrote, “I have been particularly fond of the… show more.

Karen Tumulty has written the definitive biography of Nancy Reagan. Readers will come away with a far deeper appreciation of the woman who was President Reagan’s fiercest defender and who helped shape his life and political ascent. I was especially drawn to the book by the insights Karen Tumulty provides about the Sacramento during Reagan’s time as governor, and about the Reagan’s California years before and after the presidency. Karen Tumulty’s description of Nancy Reagan’s years after Ronald Reagan’s death is especially compelling.

One of the most enduring stereotypes about poverty and welfare, has been that of the welfare queen – someone living the good life on welfare and grossly abusing the system. 

Ronald Reagan used the example of Linda Taylor in the 1970s to epitomize and capitalize on this myth in order to score political points. Josh Levin tracked down the actual story of Linda Taylor. As is so often the case, the truth is much stranger than fiction. 

A riveting biography of the individual who was at ground zero of the welfare queen myth.

Levinson is a rare thing among economists: he is willing to admit what we don’t understand.

This book argues that global productivity declined in the 1970s compared to the 30 years after World War II, and no one knows why. It seems that, under capitalism, economic growth is normally just very slow, and the fast postwar growth was the aberration. But what really matters is how political leaders responded, making a series of bad decisions to try to appease people’s over-inflated expectations of growth. And this happened all over the world, from the U.S. to Germany to Japan to Latin America. This is the book that let me understand every aspect of modern life in the last 50 years—from stagnant wages to the roller-coaster casino economy to political dysfunction to gig companies.

The book Washington chronicles the significant career of Meg Greenfield, an editorial page editor of The Washington Post. Greenfield, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, wrote the book during the last two years of her life. Greenfield’s boss and close friend Katharine Graham contributed the foreword which provides context. Greenfield came to Washington in 1961 and was hired by the Post a few years later. Her editorials at the Post and her columns in Newsweek were witty and smart. Her stories provide a political picture of Washington, D.C. at the end of the American century. She was often at the place where change happened and tells the stories well. Greenfield’s book is a fascinating read about politics, journalism, and history.

I’m a native and resident of the Northeast, but I lived for 10 years in San Francisco. During our time there, I was a little obsessed with the legacy of Mario Savio, the unassuming University of Cal-Berkeley student of the 1960s who helped lead the campus Free Speech Movement. His extemporaneous speech in protest of the school’s collaboration with the “military-industrial complex” – “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part!” – remains revolutionary. In Subversives (2012), investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld tells a sweeping story of the FSM, its origins, and its aftermath.

Laffer, Moore, and Tanous cut through the noise of party politics and examine the economic policies of past administrations.

They argue that Nixon (R) was the worst president by promulgating a weak dollar and instituting price controls. Kennedy (D) was one of the best presidents highlighting his optimism and achieving economic growth by cutting taxes.

And, of course, Ronald Reagen, whose low tax, low regulation, and pro-growth policies lifted this country from its deep morass, saved it from stagflation, and led to the eventual downfall of the USSR.

They also suggest where we go from here, arguing that low taxes and a stable dollar lead to economic prosperity.

Why The Right Went Wrong is a wicked, detailed, and easily digestible account of how the Right was overtaken by power-hungry ideologues bent on destroying government. This is not hyperbole. Dionne painstakingly documents the ascendancy of those radicals in the Republican Party, and how our present moment – of chaos and near-civil war – is in large part due to this movement outlined in his book. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand how we got “here.”

As expected from this author, this book is very funny in parts, but it’s also alarming as commentary on decline in our political leadership.

Borowitz chronicles the emergence of ignorance and stupidity as political credentials rather than disqualifiers, starting with Reagan, flowering with Dan Quayle and GWBush and Sarah Palin, and surpassing absurdity with the multiply-impeached and indicted former president and his imitators and sycophants.

Borowitz makes the point that public ignorance is no longer the embarrassment that it once was, but the opposite, becoming a criterion for electability that shows commonality with an electorate for whom knowing what you are talking about is seen as elitist. There’s a lot of blame to go around for this, but whatever the reasons, Borowitz is depressingly convincing that it doesn’t bode well for US democracy.

If Andrew Hunt’s book covers swaths of American popular culture to reveal levels of public dissent, Martin’s book takes a similar approach, but with a particular focus on grassroots activism. Across the U.S., activism took many forms. The Nuclear Freeze campaign, with its simple call to halt the arms race, inspired (in June 1982) the largest public protest in American history. Others rebelled against Reagan’s painfully slow response to even recognize the AIDS epidemic, while on college campuses students rallied against Reagan’s policies towards apartheid-era South Africa. Martin’s examination of how various strands of feminism reacted to the conservative backlash of the Reagan Era is an especially welcome addition to the decade’s historiography.