Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Raegan - Hardcover

Morris, Edmund

3.55

2,343 ratings by Goodreads

9780002177092: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Raegan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002177099 ISBN 13: 9780002177092

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1999

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The authorized life of Ronald Reagan written by America's most innovative and Pulitzer Prize-winning political biographer. This unprecedented book breaks through all conventional definitions of biography.`Poor dear. There's nothing between his ears.' So Margaret Thatcher described Ronald Reagan. But the Iron Lady, when in the `poor dear's' presence, giggled like a schoolgirl. `One could not talk to him for more than a few minutes without being aware of the ordinariness of his mind,' says Helmut Schmidt. But Mikhail Gorbachev, deconstructor of communism, is now despised by his people, while the most popular boys' name in the former USSR is Ronald. Indisputably Ronald Reagan the everyday person was opaque, pedestrian, ignorant, a hollow man - now incapacitated by Alzheimers. Yet, as President-Governor-Actor-Announcer - Lifeguard Ronald Reagan became a creature of the American folk imagination with the power to tap into vast resources of nostalgia in the American people. He is a myth; the sum total of all American fantasies. It is this Reagan that is the subject of Edmund Morris's book. Morris has been working on the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan since 1985. He has become intimate with Reagan himself, Nancy and their children, and has had unrestricted access to all Reagan's private papers. This would be enough to ensure a significant and lasting biography of this extraordinary American. However, Morris combines these benefits with enormous powers of scholarship and a literary imagination beyond compare. The result is a book truly revolutionary in form. Reagan's biography is written with a biographical doppelganger following Reagan through each phase of his life, showing how the life of Reagan integrates with his times, and explaining the great and so-far elusive mystery of the extraordinarily potent link between Reagan and the American people. This book succeeds in making literature out of the life of America's Actor-President. There has been nothing like it before.

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Review:

In what must surely be one of the most unusual and critically scrutinized biographies ever written, Edmund Morris has created a difficult but fascinating chronicle nearly as enigmatic as his book's inscrutable subject. Read by the author himself, this audio version comes replete with a special acknowledgment of the controversial nature of the book and an especially poignant closing passage addressing Reagan's senescent slide into dementia. In the explanatory preface Morris describes the rationale behind his unconventional effort: "When the biographer sits talking with the still living subject, as I did so often with President Reagan ... the story of his journey becomes, in effect, an autobiography, that interrelates with the biography he's writing. In other words, this is the true story of a real person told by an imaginary narrator who eventually mutates into myself." A curious and debatable strategy. However, using this unprecedented approach, Morris has created an unarguably intimate, highly detailed, and powerfully moving memoir which reaches a level of emotional resonance rarely achieved in more traditional biographies. (Running time: 9 hours, 6 cassettes) --George Laney

From the Inside Flap:

Read by the Author
6 cassettes / 9 hours

Edmund Morris has been absorbed in the life of Ronald Reagan for the last thirteen years, with unparalleled access to his papers, his friends, and his family.  This audiobook will inform, engross, and even astonish those who believe they already know Ronald Reagan--as well as those who do not know him at all.

When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt.  An extraordinary relationship--genial yet mysterious on the President's side, admiring yet unsentimental on Morris's--developed between the two men.  Reagan granted Morris monthly interviews in the Oval Office, plus unrestricted access to his papers and family and friends.

The result, after fourteen years of obsessive research, is a biography that is as much a memoir as narrative--a pilgrimage to the heart of Ronald Reagan's mystery.  It begins with his birth in 1911 in the heart of rural Illinois (where he is still remembered as "Dutch"), and progresses through the way stations of an amazingly varied career: young lifeguard, aspirant writer, ace sportscaster, film star, soldier, union leader, corporate spokesman, Governor, and President.

Here, recreated with participatory vividness (and some original historic audio clips) are the early achievements of the Reagan Era: a restoration of American optimism and patriotism, a re-powering of the national economy, and a massive arms buildup deliberately forcing the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism to come to terms.  Here, too, is the septuagenarian President who came to grips with some of the most fundamental moral issues of the late twentieth century--at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, in Geneva and Reykjavik and Berlin.  This audiobook closes with an achingly tender account of Reagan's pst-presidential decline into dementia.

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