Mr. Book just finished American Caesars: Lives Of The US Presidents – From Franklin D. Roosevelt To George W. Bush, by Nigel Hamilton.

This book was published in 2010.

This book covers each president from FDR to George W. Bush. Each chapter follows the same template: a section on his life prior to the presidency, his time in office and then his personal life.

This was a very disappointing book, for several reasons. When the focus of the book is spread across 12 presidents, there is no need to devote so much of it to their non-presidential years. And we don’t need all of their personal lives. Instead of personal lives, the author could have just inserted one sentence at the beginning saying something like many presidents have sex with women who they were not married to and just eliminate the personal lives sections.

It barely mentions most presidents’ domestic policies.

There was a lot of whitewashing going on in this book, such as Eisenhower’s coup against Iran, LBJ’s career-long corruption, such trivial attention given to Iran-Contra, which was more than Reagan’s treason to gain the presidency in 1980 got, and there was no mention of Bush 41’s lies and propaganda campaign to sell the first Iraq war. Instead, there was a silly allegation that when George H.W. Bush called Reaganomics voodoo, “it was he, not Reagan, who overreached.”

I give this book a C.

Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.

Mr. Book finished reading this on December 11, 2024.