Max Boot
Max Boot is a historian and biographer, best-selling author, and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. Max Boot’s biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, is his third New York Times bestseller. It was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by the New York Times, and also made best-of-the-year lists from The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Economist. It has been acclaimed as a "landmark work" (The New York Times), the "definitive biography" (The New Yorker), “magisterial" (The Washington Post), and “enormously readable and scrupulously honest” (The Sunday Times). Max Boot’s previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was also a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Reagan: His Life and Legend
Max Boot
Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician—America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography.
From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained an enigma—a man of profound contradictions—even to those closest to him. Believing that this inscrutability contributed to Reagan’s appeal, Max Boot sought to reveal the real man behind the mythology. Drawing on more than a hundred new interviews and thousands of newly available documents, Reagan tells the epic story of the Depression-era poor boy who transfixed the nation. Yet Boot, a one-time Republican policy advisor, offers no apologia, depicting a man with a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing. Providing revelatory insights into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.
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