NIGHTLY READING THREAD: Welcome to April (!) and Edition #17 of #GMGreads. Every night through this weird time, I'm tweeting out a list of my five favorite books around a general theme—and a link to an indie bookstore where you can order them online....
Tonight, in honor of a @WIRED essay I wrote yesterday about leadership in a time of crisis, I thought I'd feature some of my favorite presidential biographies (not including Lincoln or Washington—they'll be future lists on their own)....
1) Two biographies of FDR, HW Brands' TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS powells.com/book/-97803072… and then Doris Kearns Goodwin's NO ORDINARY TIME, about FDR and Eleanor together: powells.com/book/-97806848…
2) Ron Chernow's GRANT is an obvious masterpiece—it's so, so good—but if you really want to understand Grant's place in US history, you should read Joan Waugh's US GRANT: AMERICAN HERO, AMERICAN MYTH: powells.com/book/-97808078… ,
3) Writing about presidents in near real-time is hard, but two writers who have done it well are John Harris (@harrispolitico) with his book on Clinton, THE SURVIVOR, strandbooks.com/americana/surv… and then Lou Cannon, who wrote ROLE OF A LIFETIME about Reagan. bookshop.org/books/presiden…
4) Evan Thomas's IKE'S BLUFF will make a strong case that Eisenhower deserves far more greatness in our presidential pantheon than we typically give him: bookshop.org/books/ike-s-bl…
5) And of course everything Robert Caro has written about LBJ — each volume of which is fascinating and which together serve as the best portrait we've ever gotten of a president. Start here with PATH TO POWER: bookshop.org/books/the-path…
Those are tonight's #GMGreads. What are your favorite presidential biographies? What are your other favorite indie bookstores? Share! #avidreadersunite
