His Very Best

Jimmy Carter, a Life

By: Jonathan Alter

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

From one of America’s most respected journalists and modern historians comes the highly acclaimed, “splendid” (The Washington Post) biography of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian.

Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure - ridiculed and later revered - with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people.

Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the 21st.

“One of the best in a celebrated genre of presidential biography,” (The Washington Post), His Very Best traces how Carter evolved from a timid, bookish child - raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand - into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties.

This “important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution” (The New York Times Book Review) will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

©2020 Jonathan Alter. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Very enlightening

I am inspired to do more during my retirement. l spent my career in service to others. This book encouraged me not to give up. But, seek new ways to help and uplift others.

Jimmy Carter and climate change it could’ve occurred but didn’t because he was not reelected

Great book. I had never understood what a good man and wonderful president Jimmy Carter really was. What he accomplished for peace in the world, climate change, and the environment made him one of our better presidents. Had he been reelected I believe we would’ve had real action come on in I’m climate change a lot earlier

Fair, honest, thorough

Well written, objective, a pleasure to listen too. I throughly enjoyed the detail and narration

Excellent.

It's well past time that we should re-examine Jimmy Carter, and this book did a wonderful job. It peeled back the curtain not only on what the Carters presidency actually was, but also all of the factors that worked together to convince everybody that it was something else. I knew some good things about Carter going into this book, but (unlike almost any other politician), the more I actually learned about him, the more respect I gained. Now I am very much a Jimmy Carter fan.

(In all seriousness though, this book helps to illuminate a widely misunderstood period, and I would highly recommend reading it, even if you don't particularly like Carter).

Glad to Read this Book

It is important to have examples to lead us. As a Southerner, the choices we have made are not always the best but to see another human’s improvements as he works his way the the choices is confirming and inspiring. Thank you, Jimmy Carter.

A personality of extraordinary willpower &humanity

masterfully told story of Jimmy, Carter and all the many characters of our human species that are pulling the strings on power, money, ideologies, and geopolitical influence. How to achieve peace and humanity in all this mess is at the core of JC work?

Pretty comprehensive history of a complex man

The first presidential election that I was eligible to vote in, I proudly voted for "Jimmy". My mom and I agreed that he seemed like a good and decent man. Little did I know that I was also voting for one of the most complex and compelling people of all time. Many of his accomplishments as president were "before his time", including his actions on climate change.

I was disheartened to hear about the poor treatment he received from successive presidents. I'm glad to see that his reputation has changed for the better in 2020 and beyond. I highly recommend this book.

Comprehensive and informative

I was born right after Carter‘s presidency ended, so I did not know very much about the details of it or honestly the man who became president. All I really knew about was the guy afterwards all around the world doing good. What this book really illuminates to me, is how many things in our world today or influenced ultimately for the better by Carter’s presidency. Though he did not get to enjoy many of those policy changes the next 40 years of American history would not have played out how it did for better or worse, without the hard decisions that he made. If you like presidential biographies, this one is definitely worth the read.

Excellent

I have read some of Carter’s books and most of the biographies about him. I am glad to read a new in-depth biography of Jimmy Carter. He is one of the most under-covered former presidents.

The book is well written and meticulously researched. Including access to Carter’s diaries. The book is comprehensive, not overly detailed and, in my opinion, unbiased. It comes across that Alter thinks that Jimmy Carter is the most misunderstood president. At the end of the book, Alter covers Carter’s post presidency. Alter is a journalist. So, the book reads from that prospective rather than of an academic historian/biographer. If you are interested in presidential biographies, I highly recommend this book.

The book is thirty-one hours and four minutes or 670 pages. Michael Boatman does a good job narrating the book. It is my first experience with listening to Boatman. Boatman is an actor and audiobook narrator.

Incredible story about an incredible life!

although I admired President Carter immensely and valued his presidency, I had no idea how much he accomplished that remains in place today.