Gripping ... Dives straight into the contradictions that defined the man ... Boot is particularly good at depicting 1920s small-town America, and he gives full consideration to how religion shaped Reagan’s outlook.
Aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one. One might expect, given Boot’s trajectory, that this would be a full-throated defense of Reagan, the Last Good Republican. But it is not.
Magisterial ... Perhaps without consciously intending to, Boot has written the first important Reagan biography of the post-Reagan era ... Boot provides fascinating vignettes of Reagan’s upbringing and entertainment career ... Vivid ... [A] splendid biography.
Generous yet sharply perceptive ... Boot pays more attention to Washington intrigues than Reagan ever did, but his book is best when he looks away from backroom plotting. The account of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt in 1981 is alarming and also moving.
Sprawling ... Boot’s effort to paint Reagan as basically a moderate at heart—or at least in practice, by way of balancing his excesses against his moments of judiciousness—leaves the man himself somewhat inscrutable, casting him instead as an avatar of American democracy’s complicated mix of earnest dogma and muddled consensus. It makes for an unusually middle-of-the-road and not very revealing portrait.
