Reagan: The Life

Written by:
H. W. Brands
Narrated by:
Stephen Hoye

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
5
Narrator
3
Release Date
May 2015
Duration
31 hours 41 minutes
Summary
From master storyteller and New York Times bestselling Historian H. W. Brands comes the definitive biography of a visionary and transformative president

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 Reagan’s 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.
   Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the voice of The General Electric Theater on television made him an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began Reagan’s improbable political ascension, starting in the 1960s, when he was first elected governor of California, and culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the United States.
     Employing archival sources not available to previous biographers and drawing on dozens of interviews with surviving members of Reagan’s administration, Brands has crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative of the presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagan’s 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.

Look for H.W. Brands's other biographies: THE FIRST AMERICAN (Benjamin Franklin), ANDREW JACKSON, THE MAN WHO SAVED THE UNION (Ulysses S. Grant), and TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS (Franklin Roosevelt).
Reviews
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Dale Phelps

This book is not the worst written about Reagan. Edmund Morris retired that trophy. This is just an average book about a great man that spends an inordinate amount of time on every real or supposed transgression. It also quotes way too much from Reagan's diary. (That's available to me in a separate book.) The appeal of a man who won two landslide elections to be the governor of our largest state and two landslide elections to be the president of the United States seems lost on the author. The narration makes enjoying the book hard, as well. The narrator comes across like Jon Lovitz doing his "master thespian" routine.

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Asa Gaston

Attempts to quietly turn you against what virtually everyone considers a great President. This book focuses and what seems to be every blunder, possible blunder and theorized blunder of Ronald Reagan. A passive hit piece.

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