REAGAN FIRST ELECTION

REAGAN FIRST ELECTION

REAGAN FIRST ELECTION

 In his magisterial new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the twentieth century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how the confident force of Reagans personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today.
    Employing archival sources not available to previous biographers and drawing on dozens of interviews with surviving members of Reagans administration, Brands has crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative of the presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagans remote management style and fractious West Wing staff, his deft handling of public sentiment to transform the tax code, and his deeply misunderstood relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, on which nothing less than the fate of the world turned.
     Reagan is a storytelling triumph, an irresistible portrait of an underestimated politician whose pragmatic leadership and steadfast vision transformed the nation.

Review
"H.W. Brands new biography tells the [Reagan] 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. . . . Illuminating. Mr. Brands recounts Reagans triumphs and the scandals even-handedly." —The Economist

"Reagan is an engaging study of a man who Brands says defeated Soviet communism and achieved a halfway economic revolution. Drawing on Reagans diary, speeches, statements, letters and memoirs, and on interviews with the presidents aides, Brands tells a briskly paced story. . . . Reagans legacy continues to fuel the ideas and frame the choices facing his would-be successors, and this astute biography is further evidence that the 40th president continues to cast a long shadow over a still largely conservative political order." —The Washington Post

About the Author
H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class.