By JOHN WILLIAMS JULY 3, 2014
Credit Joon Mo Kang
With patriotism and fireworks in the air this weekend, the Book Review turns its attention to American life and thought, looking at new books by or about Hillary Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Supreme Court, among other subjects.
We’re part of a long tradition: On Dec. 2, 1885, The Times’s notice of the publication of Ulysses S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs” was mostly a guided tour of excerpts, after establishing some basic facts: “It is a well-made and handsome book of 584 pages.”
More than a century later, when Paul Watkins reviewed Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” the future president was still a law professor. Watkins wrote that Obama had “bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing,” but knocked the story of his time as a community organizer in Chicago, saying it “bogs down in discussions of racial exploitation without really shedding any new light on the subject.”
Prominent political figures have also assumed the critic’s role for us, as when Henry Kissinger assessed Robert L. Beisner’s biography of Dean Acheson in 2006 and Bill Clinton wrote about the fourth installment of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson opus in 2012. Clinton used the opportunity to expound on his own theories about political power, writing that Johnson “knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve.”