His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life

Product Information

His boyhood on the farm coincided almost exactly with the years of the Great Depression, when his family suffered along with the rest of the country. In other ways, he experienced many of the technologies that were coursing through the twentieth century. A second gasoline shortage came, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the Shah was overthrown in Iran and the American embassy hostages were held for 444 days. It’s never too late” to become a believer, he told Gierek, skillfully exploiting the tension between Gierek’s ancestral Catholicism and the atheism of Communist doctrine. We’ll look at the various roles he’s played—politician, reformer, diplomat, and global humanitarian.

Overall, I believe His Very Best is fantastic, a thorough biography that inspires readers to pick up other books written by and about the most forgotten president alive today.Conversely, by The Washington Post’s latest tally, President Trump has issued more than 23,000 false or misleading claims during his term — and counting.

This book provides great perspectives on many decisions for his presidency, and actually many which occurred before and after also. Wayne’s first wife was Panamanian, and his next two were also Latinas, and he and Torrijos had become fishing buddies. Time was measured not by clocks or pocket watches but by the sun and the clanging of the cast-iron farm bell. He avoided war in Latin America with the fiercely contested Panama Canal treaties and initiated a human rights policy that played a role in the later fall of the Soviet Union and the dramatic global rise in democracies. We all like the idea of saving a bit of cash, so when we found out how many good quality used books are out there - we just had to let you know!

Authors of freshly-minted presidential biographies often feel compelled to explain their rationale for writing yet another biography of a particular president. I would not recommend this biography only because the author is so annoying in constantly bringing up Trump (40 years later? He’s extremely impressive when you spend time with him because of his surpassing intelligence and his ability to charm people up close, which made him a great retail campaigner. The reception of presidential biographies usually centers on how to rank the chief executive in question — a perennial parlor game. By the late 1970s, Republicans were already alleging election fraud, comparing rioters to insects, demanding a trade war with Asia and even fretting about disease control.

Insight is also given to his record on domestic policies as Georgia senator (1963–67) and governor (1971–75), and his time in the White House (1976–80) with the Camp David Accords. Although the Democratic establishment and the press were sceptical of the new president in 1977, the public was initially spellbound and rated him highly, even as he did odd things like give them energy-saving tips or put solar panels on the White House roof. I loved that he had such a strong faith, but it wasn't performative Christianity, meant to be admired by onlookers. To him, that wasn't tough but, rather, a sign of insecurity, and he viewed the killer instinct that he lacked as a bogus prerequisite for good leadership.He was also just way too honest to be President, such as the famous malaise speech, or giving himself a B- on national TV when asked to grade his performance, rather than just avoiding the question.

Along with the civil rights movement came the huge political realignment that occurred when the Democratic party began to embrace the civil rights cause, leading to a breakup of the established party which had a strong foothold in the south. What he had done was tell staff they must speak to his secretary if they wanted to book a tennis session. He had bold plans to save the world at a time where it often seemed like the world was falling apart on his watch.A prime example of this was giving Panama control of the Panama Canal, which by treaty belonged to the US forever. More meaningful are analyses that locate a politician in context — that explain how an individual, with a unique character and set of ideas, fared in tackling the nation’s problems at a turning point in history.