Coming This Week: The Dish on Ronald Reagan
Leave it to Ron Reagan, the late president’s son, to give us an unvarnished view of My Father at 100, published to coincide with the Reagan Sr.’s birth on February 6. The news media is ablaze with the information that the younger Reagan says his father showed signs of Alzheimer’s while he was still in office, causing his half-brother Michael to call him an “embarrassment.”
The L.A. Times review reveals more personal issues:
One of the lessons here is that no father can be an uncomplicated hero to his own son. . . His book is less concerned with ideological differences than the pains and wonders of family entanglement. “You’re my son, so I have to love you. But sometimes you make it very hard to like you,” his father tells him.
By the end of this memoir, the son finds in his father,
…something carefully guarded, ice-cold yet unstoppable, fused together with a relentless self-mythologizing tendency: “He was the solitary storyteller whose great opus, religiously tended always, was his own self.”
Libraries we checked have orders in line with modest reserves to date.
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- Large Print: Thorndike Press, ISBN 9781410434371; $32.99
- CD: Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9781441771858; $32.95
- MP3: Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9781441771865; $29.95
- Playaway: Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9781441771896; $64.99
Other Notable Nonfiction on Sale This Week
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 by Douglas Brinkley (Harper) gets a good review from Kirkus: “Brinkley systematically works through the milestones of Alaskan preservation, including the moving paintings by Rockwell Kent and photographs by Ansel Adams, Adolph Murie’s fight for the wolves, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’ position as the “leading light of the wilderness movement” during the New Deal, and writings by the Beats such as Gary Snyder.”
The New Reagan Revolution: How Ronald Reagan’s Principles Can Restore America’s Greatness by Michael Reagan with Jim Denney (Thomas Dunne) outlines the elements of the former president’s political plan that his older son says is as relevant today as in 1976.