Kai Bird’s landmark presidential biography of our 39th president, The Outlier, begins, almost lyrically, by recreating the world in which Jimmy Carter grew up ... Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look ... Curiously, Bird’s story [...] does not create an overwhelming sense of Carter as a tragic, misunderstood president. Instead, his narrative engenders as much impatience with Carter as respect ... Kai Bird’s important book intentionally, and inadvertently, explains why American presidents continue to learn as much from President Carter’s mistakes as from his many achievements.
... balanced, detailed and very readable ... This compelling portrait of Carter, a complex personality who was finally undone by the Iran hostage crisis, is an absorbing look at his life and administration that should be appreciated by anyone interested in American history.
... while Kai Bird does not spare us even the slightest detail of the failures of the Carter years...he offers a bracing reminder that the 39th president was a man of probity, decency, high hopes, and high moral standards ... We needed this biography ... An admirer of the content of Carter’s character if not the content of his politics, Bird’s take on whom he calls 'our most enigmatic president' is relentlessly fair-minded ... Overall the Bird book also is a timely reminder that the Carter years were consequential years, beyond the Camp David accords ... Many historians and commentators have wrestled with the role of the South in the life of the first Southerner elected to the presidency since Reconstruction ... Bird approaches this with sensitivity and insight ... Bird’s biography redeems his presidency and reminds us of how callous we might have been during his years in office.
... an enormous amount of research and a refreshing lack of partisanship ... Bird admits at the outset of his fluidly engaging book that Carter was and remains an enigma ... Bird dramatizes the challenges faced by the Carter administration by bringing to life the people involved. The book has vibrant personality portraits of everybody from New York State politician Midge Costanza, the first woman ever named a presidential assistant, all the way to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s prickly and imperious national security adviser ... This Jimmy Carter is not a saint—but he does come across as a fundamentally decent man who was stubbornly unwilling to surrender his decency, even in the face of challenges more severe than most presidents face ... The United States may never see another presidency like Jimmy Carter’s, and as time goes on his administration increasingly looks like an outlier, the very term Kai Bird uses for its chief. Readers could find no better place to learn about that anomaly than this book.
The Outlier is a fresh take on Jimmy Carter. It presents him as a flawed but confident and capable man who spoke hard, necessary truths to his fellow Americans and racked up numerous accomplishments in office.
Although these contradictions make Carter a potentially fascinating figure, he is a surprisingly boring subject for biography ... Bird’s book offers a rich and compelling account of Carter’s sincere efforts to make American policies match the nation’s ideals.
There is a lot to disagree with, in whole or in part, in The Outlier’s depiction of Carter, but one of the reasons it is worth reading is that Bird...fair-mindedly sets down many of the counterarguments to his own case that Carter was a good president. That is why, reading The Outlier, this reader came away with a wealth of new reasons to confirm why he was, at least as president, often so bad ... On the subject of what was perhaps Carter’s greatest achievement, however, Bird is outstanding. His freshly researched and detailed account of Carter’s brokering of the landmark peace deal between Israel and Egypt is nearly worth the price of the book alone ... one of The Outlier’s considerable strengths is that, as a result of Bird’s comprehensiveness and fair-mindedness, we are presented with so many counterexamples that disprove the idea that Carter was an outlier. Reading the book, we get to see arrayed in one place how many close advisers Carter kept around him mainly because of how comfortable they made him feel—many because, in Fallows’s shrewd assessment, they owed 'their first loyalty to the welfare and advance of Jimmy Carter.'
His aptly titled, thorough, and lively biography reveals Jimmy Carter in all his complexity ... At times, The Outlier gives Carter too much credit ... Moreover, Bird’s scrupulous analysis often supports the conventional wisdom he is trying to debunk.
Carter was consumed by his inability to free the hostages, and Bird has written a compelling account of the administration’s planning for its failed rescue mission. Carter’s re-election campaign against Ronald Reagan makes for painful reading, but his visit with the Iran hostages upon their release is an emotional highlight of the book. Bird concludes with an overview of Carter’s post-presidential years. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, has been a strong influence, and their close relationship resonates throughout the book ... This engaging political biography introduce Carter to a new generation, and will remind other readers of a truly transitional time in U.S. politics.
Offering a readable, masterful biography of a complex leader, Bird does a magnificent job characterizing the many strong and fiery personalities in the Carter administration, making them all individuals with virtues and flaws.
