
Reagan
His Life and Legend
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Narrated by:
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Graham Winton
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By:
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Max Boot
About this listen
In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date” (Robert Mann).
The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, smalltown Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger.
And contextualizing Reagan’s life against American history, Boot re-creates the world in which Reagan transitioned from local Iowa sportscaster to budding screen actor.
The world of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s would prove significant, not only in Reagan’s coming-of-age in such classics as Knute Rockne and Kings Row but during the twilight of his film career, when he played opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, and then his eventual emergence as a television host of General Electric Theater, which established his bona fides as one of the leading conservative voices of the time. Indeed, the leap to California governor in 1966 seemed almost preordained, in which Reagan became a bellwether for a nation in the throes of a generational shift.
Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was not only an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to help end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. But Boot also shows how Reagan was armored in obliviousness. He traces Reagan’s opposition to civil rights over forty years, reveals how he neglected the exploding AIDS epidemic, and details how America experienced a level of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.
With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Providing fresh examinations of “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, as well as a nuanced portrait of Reagan’s family, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.
“This is a timely and fascinating book, just what we need to understand, and perhaps transcend, our current age of political paralysis and polarization. Understanding Reagan is key to understanding our politics today.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
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Story
In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.
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An honest look at Vietnam Nam and USA
- By Catherine on 01-16-18
By: Max Boot
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Ghost Dogs
- On Killers and Kin
- By: Andre Dubus III
- Narrated by: Andre Dubus III
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ghost Dogs, Dubus’s nonfiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs, and pain. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun,” Dubus reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of a violent youth and of settled domesticity and fatherhood, about the omnipresent expectations and contradictions of masculinity, about the things writers remember and those they forget.
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boring
- By Anthony on 11-16-24
By: Andre Dubus III
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When Character Was King
- A Story of Ronald Reagan
- By: Peggy Noonan
- Narrated by: Peggy Noonan
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Abridged
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No one has ever captured Ronald Reagan like Peggy Noonan. In When Character Was King, Noonan brings her own reflections on Reagan to bear, as well as new stories - from President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, his Secret Service men and White House colleagues, his wife, his daughter Patti Davis, and his close friends - to reveal the true nature of a man even his opponents now view as a maker of big history.
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5 Star Book
- By Peter on 03-04-03
By: Peggy Noonan
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Cold Crematorium
- Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
- By: József Debreczeni, Paul Olchváry - translator, Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go “left,” his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the “right,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution.
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Learned so much more about the Holocaust
- By Jerseygirl on 02-03-24
By: József Debreczeni, and others
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America First
- Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.
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Throw back in time
- By jimmie l brown on 04-24-25
By: H. W. Brands
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Richard Nixon
- The Life
- By: John A. Farrell
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 28 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.
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Well balanced and proportioned
- By Tad Davis on 06-04-17
By: John A. Farrell
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You Dreamed of Empires
- A Novel
- By: Álvaro Enrigue, Natasha Wimmer - translator
- Narrated by: Gabriel Porras
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.
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Confusing and Difficult to Understand
- By francine steelman on 03-02-24
By: Álvaro Enrigue, and others
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Riding with Reagan
- From the White House to the Ranch
- By: John R. Barletta, Rochelle Schweizer - with
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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John Barletta was a Vietnam veteran and Secret Service agent who spent over a decade with the Reagans, poised to give his own life at any moment to save the fortieth president of the United States. His superior riding skills made Barletta the perfect choice to protect Reagan during his frequent visits to the ranch. Over time, he got to know Reagan as few others did.
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Made me live the days of president Reagan!
- By TheReviewerZ on 11-26-24
By: John R. Barletta, and others
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Reaganland
- America's Right Turn 1976-1980
- By: Rick Perlstein
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz, Jonathan Todd Ross, Jacques Roy, and others
- Length: 45 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run.
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This Book is Censored by Audible
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-07-20
By: Rick Perlstein
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JFK
- Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
- By: Fredrik Logevall
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 29 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history.
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Excellent Portrait of JFK & His Times
- By John David on 12-14-20
By: Fredrik Logevall
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The Haves and Have-Yachts
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The ultrarich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos’s incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power. With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age.
By: Evan Osnos
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Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
- A Political Marriage
- By: Nicholas Wapshott
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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It is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years in office, the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister worked together to promote lower taxes, deregulation, free trade, and an aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. But according to Nicholas Wapshott, the Reagan/Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests.
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A Better Half
- By peter on 06-01-11
Remarkable biography of a political giant
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Well done
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Tremendous balance
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More Subjective by Author than he lets on
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Balanced view
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Focused on Pre-Presidency
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Informative
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Pretty good book, ok narrator
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Narrator was great
Good. But obvious bias throughout
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Finally, an honest appraisal
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