MixedThe Los Angeles TimesThe outlines of this story will be familiar to political junkies and policy wonks with long memories, but it’s told in lavish detail ... Spitz tells much of his story with a warts-and-all even-handedness: the jealousies and infighting within the administration ... Sometimes there’s too much detail, sometimes not nearly enough, the focus sharp but narrow. For the most part, the wider world in which Reagan had such a large role is missing. Spitz here is still the celebrity biographer he was with Julia Child, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. We get page after page on who got what part in what movie, who dated whom and who ate with whom in what restaurant ... And sometimes Spitz is just flat wrong ... More troublesome is the absence of any extended discussion or analysis of the legacy of a president who was surely one of the towering figures of the latter half of the 20th century ... Nonetheless, Spitz’s book, relying in part on prior Reagan books, in part on the author’s interviews with old Reagan associates, and in part on a trove of Reagan papers and documents, not only fills in many details but will inevitably also be a significant marker against which to measure our current politics and political leadership.
