FDR in Soft Focus I went into this book wanting to understand Franklin Roosevelt after watching his enormous footprints on other lives, from TR to president Johnson. I came out unsure whether I was disappointed in FDR or in how Smith chose to write about him. In the end I finished with more questions than answers, especially about Franklin and Eleanor, along with his legacy in the economy and post WW2 world. ...
Comfortably Aloof and Right (wing) On the American right, Reagan has already acquired mythic status. “Reagan Republican” is the purest form of conservatism, especially in contrast to the two Bush presidencies. This book helps explain that myth—but also shows why I don’t share it. Reagan, as Brands tells it, embodies most of what I don’t want in a president: aloof from detail, ideological rather than pragmatic, and firmly in the FDR/JFK lineage of style over substance. I don’t doubt his conviction or quarrel much with his broad aims. The problem is execution. Brands is at his best showing how the mantra of “cut taxes and cut spending” never really added up. Reagan pushed through large tax cuts and a major defense buildup, but serious, sustained spending cuts never followed; deficits and debt ballooned instead. This isn’t ideology, it’s just debt. ...
Not a book, more a director’s commentary on the rest of Caro’s oeuvre. Yet Caro’s other books are so good I have no problem revisiting the Tri-Borough bridge or the sad irons of West Texas. I can’t imagine readig this in lieu of his other works, and it feels just a bit too transactional between Caro, Amazon and myself, but if Caro makes a buck, I’m OK with that. Perhaps what makes me sad about books like the Power Broker and the Lyndon Johnson series is the extent to which Caro researched and produced them. Few topics will receive the treatment that Caro gave to these areas, leaving us, poor readers, still in the dark on most subjects we read about.
** Deus Ex Honor ** I understand the now Honor Harrington books run on a clear formula: Honor does the right thing, ruffles lesser egos, then redeems herself in battle. It’s competence porn, executed with military precision. Rather than deus ex machina, we get artes armorum a Deo—godlike weapons skills. Last book it was pistols, this time its swords. The climax is usually a well-executed space battle, the kind that’s as much poker math as mayhem. ...
Succeeds where Jack Campbell fails, providing some military scifi to fall asleep to without too many eye-rolls. The villains are cookie cutter, and Honor’s dueling abilities with any weapon seem a bit unfair, but after accepting that the rest of the story rolls out easily.
Trophy Kids and Other Casualties Madeline Levine’s The Price of Privilege tries to dissect the malaise of affluent adolescents in the 2010’s, and occasionally succeeds. Its most useful moments are scattered insights: “the best gift you can give your kids is a good marriage”, or her indictment of “maladaptive perfectionism”—the silent plague of the well-off. Her core claim is that psychological control corrodes, while authoritative structure builds. Parents, she argues, should anchor their children emotionally—“serve as the emotional ballast”—while prioritizing their child’s value, effort, and only then performance. Self-efficacy is emphasized as equal in importance to self-esteem. ...
** Decent Man, Decent Presidency ** Gerald Ford was not meant to be president. But when history handed him the job, he handled it with anachronistic decency. In a political era dominated by Nixonian shadows and LBJ’s compulsive meanness, Ford’s restraint was almost radical. “Decent men, when placed in positions of trust, will perform decently.” The book makes the case that Ford did just that. Ford is less a natural politician and more the high school football star who accidentally stepped into the presidency. That’s not a bad thing. His competence wasn’t theatrical nor his ambition consuming. ...
** Absentee Parenting ** For a book about fatherhood, there’s a surprising lack of fathers. Darwin shuffles through as the sole emotional protagonist—grieving, pacing, detached—while the rest are mostly historical men who happened to have children. Those who shaped the world often failed their families. The book catalogs legacy, not intimacy. Structures abound—patriarchy, empire, labor—but emotion gets footnoted. My takeaway is that when it comes to being a father, trying is more than half the battle. Then get good at being funny and good at hugging. ...
** Dread not: missing this one ** Jack Campbell’s Dreadnaught reads like a war story written by someone who’s never navigated the fog of war—or bureaucracy. Surprising, given Campbell’s rank as a Navy Lt. Commander—though evidently not high enough to grasp systems theory. Dreadnaught aims for gravitas but lands somewhere between space soap and HR training video. The central emotional thread— lingering tension between Geary and Captain Desjani—feels like it wandered in from a bad fanfic. It registers as cringe. ...
Positioned chronologically and literarily between excellent biographies of Truman and Eisenhower on one side, and Robert Caro’s towering work on Johnson on the other, this Kennedy biography is middling. Kennedy’s story is amazing! His heroic endurance after the PT-109 disaster is epic, and his quote about committing fully to the life of a politician reveals a man more self-aware than often credited. The most important narratives in Kennedy’s legacy—Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his legislative wrangling—are told with more clarity and insight in other works. The Best and the Brightest handles Vietnam with sobering depth. Caro’s Master of the Senate shows us 60’s politics with dramatically more nuance. And One Minute to Midnight captures the dread and detail of the missile crisis in a way this biography can’t match. ...