The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter Reviews

• 
  Thomas

  I enjoyed reading this comprehensive biography of a much maligned President. I rate it 4.5 stars rounded up. The author goes beyond the Reagan electoral landslide to point out that the popular vote was fairly close if you add Anderson and Carter together--47,6% to Reagan's 50.7%. In addition, nearly 50% of eligible voters did not vote.
  The author lists some of Carter's major accomplishments:
  Domestic:
  Deregulation of energy, trucking and airline sectors. Energy set the US on the road to energy independence of today. Airlines opened up to middle class Americans.
  Foreign:
  Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel
  Panama Canal Treaty
  Alaska National Parks/wilderness/Wildlife refuges expansion--the largest of any US President
  Succeeded in getting all US hostages released from Iran without a single person getting killed. Contrast that with 284 US Marines killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon under Reagan a few years later.
  This is a door stopper of a book--628 pages of text with another 150 pages of bibliography, footnotes and index. It took me 11 days to read it.
  The author did extensive research, interviewing about a hundred people, reading Carter Presidential papers and many other sources.
  One quote: Then Georgia governor giving his inaugural speech: "This is a time for truth and frankness...I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over."
  Lieutenant Governor Maddox, sitting on the platform, was stunned, and soon denounced him as a liar. Jody Powell retorted. "Being called a liar by Lester Maddox is like being called ugly by a frog."
  I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks to Kai Bird and Random House for sending me this book.
• 
  Montzalee Wittmann

  The Outlier
  The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
  by Kai Bird
  Crown Publishing
  I want to thank the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read this terrific book!
  
  Jimmy Carter has to be my favorite President. Obama was good but even he had flaws he just hid them. With Carter, he was open and honest and according to polls, people would rather have someone that breaks the rules a few times if it means getting things done. Not me, I want someone with integrity and honestly! But Carter did get things done. I think Carter's time in office was often bad timing on the world stage and other staged plots by Roy Cohn as described in the book.
  
  This follows Carter from his humble beginning on a farm with no running water or electricity to after his Presidency. From boy, man, husband and soldier, to Senator, Governor, then to President and beyond. It deals with family, friends, co-workers, his ideals, his accomplishments, and his failures. It told how he was conservative on some things and liberal on others.
  
  As Governor, and this really wasn't too different than when he was President, he worked for prison reform, education, climate and preserving land, childcare, hunger, and more. But he also was ok with the death penalty for some cases.
  
  As President, he was before his time in climate change. He put solar panels on the White House. (Of course ignorant Reagan took them down!) The only big problem he had was one of his main advisors was accused of cooking the books and the rest of his staff made the guy resign. After the trial, he was proven innocent. Roy Cohn later was the one that started it all to bring shame on Carter's legacy. Carter's popularity went down due to that.
  
  He was working on the high inflation, about had it going in the right direction but not in time to save his election bid, and he should've cut defense spending and focused more on internal development. But the was no wars but a hostage situation at the end of his term, again due to interference.
  
  Overall, Carter manage to get the Panama deal, and several more international issues started or completed. Social security running well. Other major accomplishments we take for granted today. He tried to get a universal healthcare but couldn't get it through. Obama's healthcare piggybacked off of Carter's.
  
  Carter, in his later 90's, is still helping humanity. Still the honest, sweet man that did what he felt was right and didn't care what side of the political stick you were on.
  
  This is a very informative and interesting look into a great man. It doesn't matter if you are a Democrat or Republican, this is a story of a solid citizen, too honest for politics, but he accomplished things anyway! Highly recommend!
• 
  Lorna

  The Outlier: The Life and Presidency of Jimmy Carter was a well-researched biography of probably one of the most underestimated and misunderstood presidencies of our time. And I include myself in those in that quandry about President Carter's time in the White House and the valuable contributions that were made. One of my favorite southern writers is William Faulkner and he was also one of Carter's favorite novelists. Kai Bird alludes to the significance of this as follows:
  
  

  "William Faulkner, later one of Carter's favorite novelists, described his homeland as a 'deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.' Carter later read all of Faulkner's novels, and he said that 'on many occasions I've read them aloud to my children.' He thought Faulkner had captured the struggle between 'good and evil. . . perhaps better than any other Southern writer.' This Southern novelist, he said, understood the 'self-condemnation resulting from slavery, the humiliation following the War Between the States.' More than most white southerners, the rural folk of South Georgia had defied assimilation and loyally clung to their native culture as a matter of principle. They had their own vernacular and distinctive accent. And they had their own religion, an unvarnished evangelical southern Protestantism that affirmed the supremacy of the white race in society and patriarchy at home."

  
  
  Jimmy Carter from the very beginning of his candidacy was an outsider and also an outlier in that he had no ties with the political elite in Washington, nor did he care. He came to power from the heart of the Deep South in 1976 on the heels of the scandalous Nixon presidency and the Watergate debacle as well as the gaping wounds in the nation from the disastrous Vietnam war. Jimmy Carter was not only a former Naval officer but a Calvanist at heart and determined to do what was right for the country with little consideration to the potential political consequences. But in that vein, he accomplished far more than most people give him credit.
  
  

  "Taken together, Carter's early record on all these foreign policy issues--human rights, SALT II treaty, the Panama Canal treaties, and his decision to cancel an expensive weapons program like the B-1 bomber--suggested a president who was unafraid to take on major foreign policy issues, even as these achievements came with considerable political costs."

  
  
  There are parts of this book that are heartbreaking as we see how hard his administration pushed for national health care insurance, a program ironically modeled closely after the Carter bill by Barack Obama three decades later with the introduction of his universal health care plan, as we know as 'Obamacare.' And for me the kicker was that Senator Edward Kennedy's refusal to support Carter's incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-1979 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. And then of course there were the American hostages in Iran taken captive for 144 days as the Carter administration continued to work for their release, ironically achieved minutes after the inaugaration of Ronald Reagan as president.
  
  Probably one of the single most far-reaching highlights of his presidency was the Camp David Accords where he brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together for twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David resulting in political agreements signed on September 17, 1978. This resulted in a sea change in Middle Eastern politics prompting the disintegration of a united Arab front in opposition to Israel.
  
  But I would be remiss if I didn't mention the dedicated ragtag Georgia boys that had been with Jimmy Carter during his governorship and now were in the White House in their blue jeans with very different and shocking ways to the Washington D. C. establishment, namely Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. I think the author says it best:
  
  

  ". . . the Secret Service watched silently as a disheveled Jody Powell pushed his aging blue Volkswagon off the White House grounds and into the street. The fifteen year-old engine refused to start. It was a metaphor. The Georgia boys were done. But contrary to conventional wisdom offered by the Washington punditocracy, they left behind a consequential presidential legacy. Jimmy Carter changed the country."
• 
  Bill

  Jimmy Carter is enjoying a real renaissance lately, as the subject of several new biographies and documentaries. It could be because enough time has passed that his presidency can now be analyzed as history, it could be because of his sheer longevity and status as the eldest of our elder statesman, or it could be because even a conventional “failed presidency” looks pretty good now compared to what we just lived through.
  
  At any rate, it’s difficult not to compare Kai Bird’s biography with Jonathan Alter’s
  His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, the last major Carter biography that came out last year, and even Bird gives a hat tip to Alter’s work in his acknowledgments. I like reading multiple biographies of the same person to get different perspectives (says the guy who just read seven books in a row about Martin Van Buren), so I was interested to get Bird’s take on Carter. But I have to say, beat-by-beat, Bird’s and Alter’s works are substantially the same book, with many of the same emphases, the same anecdotes and the same structure - both offer dialogue-heavy, fly-on-the-wall, chronological, sympathetic portrayals of Carter's public life. There are, however, a few key differences, the main one being that Bird’s book is very good - but Alter’s is much better.
  
  The main, obvious difference is that Bird chose to focus mostly on Carter’s presidency while Alter devotes more time to his full life story. To his credit, Bird doesn’t race through Carter’s upbringing and pre-presidency in a brief prologue - he devotes a good 100+ pages to it. While it’s not as satisfying as Alter’s longer treatment of this part of Carter’s life, it does help lay the foundation for the story of Carter’s presidency. That said, Bird looks at Carter’s upbringing mostly through the lens of race relations, which is an important part of his life story and political development, but equally important are his education and experience as an engineer and businessman, which aren’t explored as thoroughly.
  
  Bird devotes the bulk of his book to Carter’s presidency, though I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what he did with all this extra space that Alter didn’t also thoroughly cover in 1/3rd fewer pages. Bird does sketch out fuller portraits of many of Carter’s staffers and Cabinet members, and provides more background leading up to major events like the Camp David summit and the Iran hostage crisis. And his telling of those events is excellent, particularly the dramatic, day-by-day tick-tock of the Camp David talks. Carter’s domestic struggles with the economy, the energy crisis and his tense relations with more liberal members of his party and the Democratic Congress are also well-covered (though curiously, Joe Biden only gets a couple of cursory mentions in the book, even though he was the first Senator to endorse Carter in 1976 - even slightly more space devoted to their relationship would have made the book just a little more timely).
  
  Two drawbacks about Bird’s book really stood out to me, though. One, he never seems to question or fact-check some of the more colorful anecdotes he uses. Alter takes with a grain of salt some of the stories Carter relates in the many autobiographical books he's written. A story Carter tells in which, as a young businessman, he threatened to flush a $5 bill down the toilet instead of paying it as dues to a local white-supremacist business organization is described as “suspiciously colorful” in Alter’s book, as he notes that Carter included the story in only one of the three books in which he described the incident. But Bird relates the story as fact, with no attribution in the text and no skepticism.
  
  Bird also relates without question Carter’s anecdote about his mother being surrounded by reporters and asked after his inauguration if she’s proud of her son, to which she cheekily responds, “Which one?” This question-and-retort has been attributed to many others prior to Miss Lillian, including Dwight Eisenhower’s mother, and I can find no reporting at the time that this exchange really happened on Inauguration Day, or any other time. A 1985 Helen Thomas column claims it happened during the campaign - it’s possible she created this legend and Carter ran with it and elided some of the details (he even tells the same story in slightly different ways in two of his books), but I question whether it happened at all. Bird doesn’t. And Alter, tellingly, doesn’t mention it.
  
  Bird also tells the story of Carter getting on stage with Dizzy Gillespie to sing “Salt Peanuts” - but he tells it twice in the book, describing it as happening at two different events at two different times. It only happened once, but Carter conflated the two events in one of his books - so Bird does, too, even though by doing so, he ends up contradicting himself in his own book.
  
  And in one of the most memorable parts of Carter's "malaise speech" in which he quoted "a southern governor" as telling him, “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation - you’re just managing the government," Bird misattributes that quote to Bill Clinton instead of South Carolina governor Richard Riley. Not only that, but he somehow combines several different comments from several different people into one long quote and attributes all of it to Clinton!
  
  These are all small, relatively unimportant little stories in the grand scheme of things. But they illustrate Bird’s somewhat troubling tendency of taking people’s word for what happened, or picking up some "fact" from somewhere, without considering the source or bothering to double-check whether the accounts are really true. If he didn’t fact-check the small stuff, what are we to make of the more important stuff he writes about?
  
  The second drawback of Bird’s book is laid out right in the prologue. “No modern president worked harder at the job and few achieved more than Carter in his one term in office,” he writes gushingly. Carter’s commitment to human rights “contributed more to the disintegration of the Soviet system than did Ronald Reagan’s reckless spending on Star Wars.” Etc., etc. At least Bird shows his hand and expresses his point of view right up front, but he could have been a little less hyperbolic in his praise. Alter’s portrayal of Carter’s presidency is sympathetic but fair - he credits Carter for his tangible achievements, and points out where he deserves credit for initiating programs or reforms that didn’t fully come to fruition until after he left the White House. But he also doesn’t hesitate to point out Carter’s missteps and shortcomings.
  
  In Bird’s telling, Carter’s efforts are always underappreciated, his critics are always wrong, the press is always unfair, and everyone who judged his presidency to be a disappointment is simply mistaken. Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is portrayed as a Svengali who was responsible for many of Carter’s biggest missteps, and the irresponsible press was solely to blame for “the public perception of the Carter administration as weak and ineffectual.”
  
  But perception is no small thing. Carter’s presidency cannot be dismissed as a complete failure, and both Alter and Bird rightly try to correct that. But his presidency also cannot be whitewashed as a great, unheralded success that America just didn’t appreciate at the time. It's true, after all, that Carter could be a micromanaging technocrat whose actions and words were often not persuasive or inspirational. The best leaders inspire you to do better, they don’t lecture you about what you’ve done wrong. They are strong in their convictions and don’t vacillate in their responses. And no one can be an effective leader if they can't persuade anyone to follow.
  
  Alter acknowledges all of these faults. Bird excuses them. Alter’s book is a balanced biography that celebrates Carter’s successes but also helps you understand why his is not a celebrated presidency. Bird’s book is thorough, well-meaning and well-written but veers too close to hagiography in its conclusions, and he doesn’t really make a case in support of his subtitle describing Carter’s presidency as “unfinished”. Together with his troubling tendency to get simple facts wrong - even little things that an amateur like me was able to spot - these drawbacks keep his book from being excellent. It’s a very good read. But in the final analysis, Alter’s is simply better.
• 
  Steve

  
  https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2021...
  
  Kai Bird’s “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” is the most recent full-length review of the life and legacy of the 39th president. Bird is a journalist and author who has written biographies of McGeorge and William Bundy, CIA operative Robert Ames and presidential adviser John McCloy. His co-written “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
  
  Although this book is the direct result of six years of research and writing, Bird has been intrigued with Jimmy Carter for nearly four decades. Drawing from the unpublished diaries of members of Carter’s presidential staff and his lawyer/adviser Charlie Kirbo, Bird is able to provide behind-the-scenes color unavailable in previous Carter biographies. But his thesis – that Carter was a more successful and decisive president than is generally recognized – is by now a fairly conventional perspective.
  
  Bird’s writing style is straightforward and rarely flashy; he relies on well-articulated facts and embedded dialogue rather than descriptive scene-setting and literary flourishes to guide the reader. And although Bird’s emphasis is clearly on Carter’s presidency (consuming more than three-fourths of the 628-page narrative) he does devote meaningful attention to Carter’s upbringing and post-presidency.
  
  Most readers will quickly notice Bird’s fondness for his subject. But if the author’s affinity for Carter is undeniable (and his praise consistently effusive) he is almost as quick to point out Carter’s peculiarities, flaws and shortcomings. On balance, however, Bird is notably forgiving of Carter’s faults and believes his presidential legacy has more room to rise.
  
  One of this book’s greatest strengths is its consistently-thorough introductions to important supporting characters. Nearly everyone who plays an important role in Carter’s political life receives a robust, context-rich portrait. These are not quite as colorful as the “mini-biographies” featured in Robert Caro’s series on LBJ or in Adam Cohen’s review of FDR’s first 100 days, but they are invaluable in educating and engaging the reader.
  
  Additionally, Bird provides an interesting chapter on Carter’s selection process for cabinet members and senior advisers, a fascinating review of Carter’s life in the White House and a colorful chapter on Carter’s relationship with his first speechwriter. Bird also provides a notably memorable chapter on the Camp David Accords and countless entertaining “fly on the wall” moments during Carter’s presidency. Finally, Bird’s observations in the book’s final pages regarding Carter’s legacy prove thoughtful.
  
  But while this biography of Carter is quite good, it falls short of the standard set by Jonathan Alter’s “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life.” Bird’s biography is only slightly shorter, but devotes less than half the pages to Carter’s childhood, naval career and early political life that Alter provides. All the essential elements of Carter’s extraordinary climb are present in Bird’s narrative but his biography fails to include certain observations, anecdotes, context and nuances vital to fully capturing Carter’s persona.
  
  And while Bird’s coverage of the Carter presidency is 150 pages longer than Alter’s, I cannot think of an important presidential moment missing in Alter’s treatment. But where both authors feel Carter’s presidential service is under-appreciated, Alter’s biography explores Carter’s strengths and weaknesses with equal fervor while Bird more frequently seems to excuse Carter’s most politically-problematic flaws.
  
  Overall, Kai Bird’s “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” is unquestionably good…but not quite great. Readers relying on this biography of Carter as a sole source of insight into his life will walk away with a solid understanding of his life and times. But in my view, Jonathan Alter’s book (published last fall) remains the undisputed “go to” biography of Jimmy Carter.
  
  Overall Rating: 4 stars
• 
  Kifflie

  For me, this book started out strong, got a little bogged down in the middle, and recovered well at the end.
  
  Those of us of a certain age remember the Carter Administration as well-meaning, but out of its depth, with the President's stubbornness and micro-managing style contributing to many of its failures. But Bird tries to show, with some success, that there were accomplishments as well -- on human rights, environmentalism, getting inflation under control, and securing peace between Israel and Egypt.
  
  It's a good effort, even though I found the writing style a bit clunky, and some of the events hard to follow.
• 
  Gregory

  The Outlier is book on Jimmy Carter's presidency, but it feels more like a biography than a more traditional history of an administration. Bird presents a very sympathetic view of Carter and his personality, but does not shy away from his flaws and failings. Overall, it is favorable to President Carter, his policies, and achievements. He considers Carter to be an under appreciated, consequential president who was ahead of his time in many policy proposals, especially regarding energy. If there is a villain it is National Security Advisor Zbiginew Brzezinski. It seems his every idea and recommendation to president was the wrong one to follow. Its almost comical. Despite its length, I felt The Outlier omitted some information that I as a reader would have appreciated. For example, there is almost no discussion of votings in the 1976 primaries or either the 1976 or 1980 general elections. Carter's enemies -- be them Democrats or Republicans -- seem to get a very superficial analysis. I felt some legislation/laws were mentioned but their contents went largely unexplained.
• 
  Trevor Seigler

  I really enjoyed this biography of Jimmy Carter, AKA "History's greatest monster!"
  
  All kidding aside (and that Simpsons quote aside), Jimmy Carter was one of those presidents that I grew up being told was a bit of a failure. There was his obvious inability to get re-elected in 1980 (a year after I was born), and then the fact that I grew up in the South, which is almost mind-numbingly conservative and backwards when it comes to regarding someone with Carter's decency and integrity as anything other than "a damn dirty liberal" for daring to come into office with any sort of interest in helping those less fortunate or ignored by the white power structure that has long dominated American politics. But Carter's administration was, according to this biography, much more substantial than it might first appear.
  
  "The Outlier" by Kai Bird goes a long way towards rescuing Carter's time in office from its reputation as a time of malaise and heartache, though it doesn't shy from acknowledging the faults that made Carter a one-term president. Almost from the beginning, his time in office was characterized by his reluctance to play the Washington power game, and the sense that he and his cohorts were "Georgia hayseeds" who didn't want to mingle with the Georgetown set. That snobbishness was in a sense justified, as Carter had been elected on a promise of being an outsider and meant to maintain that status in many ways, often to his detriment.
  
  Carter came to office after a run at being the governor of a Deep South state that was mired in the Civil Rights movement as a bastion for white supremacy; his 1970 campaign for Georgia's highest office wasn't exactly a bellweather for racial harmony. But Carter distinguished himself in many ways on the issue of race in Georgia, and emerged as an unlikely harbinger of post-Watergate, post-Vietnam healing of the divides in this country. With his ascent to the White House, he baffled the pre-conceived notions of post-JFK Democrats and liberals, governing in many ways like a more conservative president than they would've liked. Bird lists many of the moments that he says showed Carter to be a more shrewd and adept president than historians or pundits would be likely to admit. I'm admittedly not well-versed in Carter's life and work, but before this book I read Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland" and can tell you that Perlstein's version of Carter's time in office is somewhat less flattering than Bird's. But I think the truth is that Bird, while obviously playing up some of Carter's better moments as president, doesn't shy away from the times when Carter's hubris and belief in his intelligence got him into a situation that a different president might have handled better. From his lack of a chief of staff to his detail-oriented approach to solving problems, Carter could not delegate authority at times when he would've benefited from a less hands-on approach. But in the long term, Bird argues quite convincingly that Carter was a more substantial president than his one term would suggest (and he also argues that the release of the American hostages in Iran was held up due to subterfuge on the part of Reagan's campaign manager, which I don't find hard to believe honestly).
  
  "The Outlier" is a portrait of a man who, though not perfect in his time in office, may deserve more praise for his presidential administration than he has so far. Jimmy Carter is, as of this writing, the longest-lived former president, and he has built a reputation in his post-presidency that few before or since can claim. Kai Bird has written a moving, revealing book about a man whose decency and intelligence may not have made him a successful president in many terms, but whose efforts were usually coming from the right place (and who had to fend off challenges from many in his own ranks, including Ted Kennedy's self-aggrandizing presidential bid in 1980). The time to re-evaluate Jimmy Carter's presidency has come, and this book is a good place to start.
• 
  Dave

  It is always interesting to read histories of events you lived through. What did you miss? What did you forget? The positive events and accomplishments of the Carter presidency are often lost in the shadow of a few major, negative events. And they are major, no doubt about that. High inflation (a problem that his predecessor, Gerald Ford, also unsuccessfully wrestled with). The Iran embassy hostages.
  
  His efforts for Middle East peace are probably the main positive thing people will remember. But there was much more, both in domestic and foreign policy. The man was not perfect, but it is easy to see that he tried to do what he was certain was the right thing to do, and damn the political consequences.
  
  Kai Bird spent years researching this book and pulls together a convincing story. And by the way, if someone hasn't put together a book of the best of Lillian Carter (his mother), they should. She was a hoot.
• 
  Eric

  Rick Perlstein did a much better job conveying the contemporary feel of Carter's presidency in Reaganland and Bird gives only a brief treatment of Carter's life after the presidency. The major exception is Bird's superior treatment of Carter's positions regarding the Palestinians and the bases and consequences of those positions. Bird's insistence that Carter was a liberal, despite his neoliberal policies and the liberal opposition they so often generated, is at the root of most of the book's weaker spots. This was still a worthy effort, as is everything I've read from Kai Bird.
• 
  Edward Meshell

  Wow I wish I could give this book more than 5 stars. I’ve read a lot of books about Jimmy and this is one of if not the top one. It focuses a lot on his presidency which I thoroughly enjoyed. It felt like I was in the west wing with him in 1977-1981! Really enjoyed this read, it will definitely be referred to a lot when studying about Jimmy Carter and his life and presidency!
• 
  Петър Стойков

  Джими Картър е американският президент, който предшества Рейгън. Ако си спомним, че Рейгън идва на власт след най-голямата победа в историята на президентските избори в САЩ, можем да се замислим какво пък толкова се е изложил предшественикът му, та хората толкова единодушно да решат да го сменят.
  
  Без съмнение, Картър е особняк както в личния, така и в политическия си живот, което понякога му носи неочаквани успехи, а другаде - очаквани негативи. Авторът Кай Бърд не крие симпатиите си към субекта на тази биография, но дори той не може да скрие, че президентството на Картър неуспешно както от икономическа гледна точка (кризата на 70-те, доколко е негова вина е друг въпрос, но не прави нищо резултатно за да се справи с нея), така и от политическа (не го избират за втори мандат).
  
  Книгата е подробна, както подобава на биография, но поради това естествено, е доста тегава за всеки, който не е интимно заинтересуван от всякакви подробности в живота и работата на Картър.
• 
  Jan Peregrine

  The Outlier~~~
  
  Kai Bird's 2021 biography of America's 39th president, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, seems to me a fitting tribute to Carter, now 97, even if the Carters didn't appreciate Bird's description of Jimmy thirty years ago or today. His book is twenty-five years in the making, you could say. Bird waited for Jimmy's extensive White House diary and other archival records to be released or discovered with Jimmy's help. The former president was also interviewed several times at his ranch home in Plains, Georgia where he and Rosalyn have lived for at least fifty years.
  
  There's a joke Jimmy enjoys about a boy, asked what he wants to be when he grows up, who replies, “a former president.”
  
  Bird has three sections in his book: four or five-chapters on his pre-presidency, twenty or so chapters on his presidency, one chapter on his post-presidency. While the middle section comprises most of the book, the other sections were most interesting to me.
  
  What I find most interesting in a biography is understanding the character of the person. His presidential years may interest you more, but Bird astutely started his biography on how Jimmy's rural Georgia childhood and political beginnings influenced his decisions as president. I knew about this in a very general way and learned quite a bit.
  
  Did you know that his only friends were the sons of his father's dirt poor tenant farmers?
  
  Did you know he and Rosalyn had three boys and then Amy fifteen years later when she was 40?
  
  Did you know the Carter's nanny in the White House was wrongfully charged with murder and was a 'trustee' when she came to clean the Governor's mansion and that this felon has been their housekeeper since they left the White House?
  
  I was intrigued that Jimmy broke with his racist Southern Baptist faith to embrace integration and civil rights. In fact, he defiantly hung a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Governor's Mansion.
  
  This could be a very long review, but I just want to present a sketch that reveals Jimmy's character.
  
  Bird shows us a man who had many dirty tricks played on him in the White House by the Republicans, that he was too loyal to his aggressive Defense Secretary, and that he did many beneficial things as well as harmful things that kept him from winning a second term. He lost the faith of evangelicals, liberals, and progressives as well and sadly started the country's shift to a hostile, partisan, conservative trend in society. All succeeding presidents, except for Trump, have focused on human rights as inspired by Carter.
  
  Carter's humanitarian work didn't end with his 'populist' presidency, not by a long shot, and he well deserved the Nobel Peace Prize than he won. Bird discusses how influential the Carter Center has been with its mission of conflict resolution and eradicating diseases of less developed countries.
  
  Jimmy's administration never started or sustained a war. Never had political scandal. He didn't make himself rich and was almost bankrupt at the end. The Georgians were Washington outliers.
  
  I've read a couple of his many books and enjoyed them. I'll have to look up the one he wrote with Rosalyn where they had to write it in separate paragraphs to keep from getting a divorce! Their marriage is a strong one still today.
  
  The epilogue sums up Carter's many positive accomplishments and why Bird believes he was a one-term president, which isn't completely Jimmy's fault. Globalization was devastating the old structure.
  
  Two brief photo sections are included. Highly recommended for all interested in politics.
  
• 
  J Earl

  The Outlier: The Life and Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird is an enlightening reassessment of Carter's presidency by putting it in line with the rest of his life. Doing so shows that what went right or wrong in his administration was less about doing the "wrong" thing but doing what he believed was the "right" thing regardless of political fallout or the impact on his reputation. When embedded in a system that rewards corruption and rarely does the "right" thing because it is right, trying to be fair and equitable becomes unpopular and comes largely to failure through efforts of those who want to undermine.
  
  What makes this such a compelling read is that Carter is not presented as some kind of saint, his mistakes and weak points are mentioned as well as his good. But we see the consistency with which he leads his life. So often in politics, some current new upcoming right wing terrorists that have been elected to Congress are perfect examples, when a politician gains a platform those who knew them before don't recognize them. they change in big ways, not just shifting a bit on policy one way or another. Carter has been, as a human being, far more consistent than most of us and definitely far more than almost all politicians. Thus the dismal view of his term, we tried to do what he thought was right rather than what might get him reelected. And the evil regime that followed threw American lives away in order to seal that fate.
  
  I would recommend this to those who would like to reconcile, in their minds, Carter's presidency with the Carter we have all come to respect in his post-presidency. In addition, for those who appreciate a good biography that contextualizes the events rather than simply telling them will enjoy this book.
  
  Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
• 
  Clem

  I was too young to remember much about the Jimmy Carter presidency. When I attended college in the late 1980s, I had a professor who sardonically commented that Carter was “the last president who ever died while in office”. After reading this wonderful, yet somewhat sad, biography of Carter, I now know where such sarcastic sentiments come from when looking at the ill-fated one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter.
  
  Although one could argue that this book is in fact a biography, the vast majority of the book focuses on the four years of 1977-1980. Author Kai Bird does give us a little bit of Carter’s youth and upbringing, but does so sparingly. This section seems to be included only to emphasize the fact that the deep south was highly racist during Jimmy Carter’s youth, and the only person south of the Mason-Dixon line who was NOT a racist, was Carter himself. At least that was the feeling one gets while reading this.
  
  We then make great leaps from Carter the youth to Carter the soldier to Carter the local politician to Carter the governor of Georgia in only a few pages. In fact, once Carter becomes governor, this book doesn’t really tell us anything he did during his tenure, other than use it as a steppingstone to the White House. There’s not really a whole lot here about the campaign during 1976 either. It seems like the author is simply trying to quickly get to the presidency since that is where he wants to put the majority of his focus. I don’t really mean this as a criticism, merely an observation. I’ll just warn you that if you’re wanting a deep dive into Jimmy Carter before he became president, I’m not sure this book will scratch your itch. In fact, AFTER the presidency, there’s only one measly chapter dealing with Carter’s life from 1980 to the present. So doing the math shows you that you get about twenty pages of book detailing forty-plus years of the man’s life.
  
  So this book is really devoted to Carter as President of the U.S.A. The book is incredibly interesting and captivating. Sometimes books about political figures draw you too deep into the weeds and bore the helpless reader. I felt this way at times when I read Stu Eizenstat’s (Carter’s Domestic Affairs Advisor) book on The Carter administration, which included an entire 77-page chapter on stagflation. Oy. This isn’t the case with Kai Bird’s account. This book moves swiftly from event to event and each chapter is told in the exact amount of detail that is required. Obviously, such chapters that deal with the Camp David Accord and the Iranian hostage crisis go into far more detail, but it’s all necessary and never boring. In fact, there were times when I would be so enraptured when reading about the politics of Iran before the Shah was deposed, I forgot that I was actually reading a book about a presidency and not the event itself. When a chapter such as this ended, I felt rocked and jarred upon arriving at the next chapter. I simply didn’t want the former narrative to end.
  
  Kai Bird’s underlying theme here is that Jimmy Carter was ahead of his time. Carter had great initiatives (human rights, energy conservation, environmentalism, etc.), but they weren’t really at the forefront of most voters minds back in the 1970s. The author focuses on this at the beginning, and at the end, of this book. He definitely is an apologist for Carter and is obviously a fan. Fortunately, though, this opinion isn’t tainted throughout the whole narrative. He doesn’t make excuses for Carter’s gaffes as president, and there were sadly tons. The main theme here is that Carter was (and is) a great human being, but he simply wasn’t that great of a president. In fact, we come to the conclusion that the only reason a man like Jimmy Carter could get elected president, was because the country was in more turmoil than it had ever been due to Watergate. Voters were so sick of politics as usual, that they were very eager to welcome an unheard of, fresh, smiling face into the office; even if he was a peanut farmer from the deep south. It couldn’t be worse than what they had gone through during the last four years. Could it?
  
  Well, here is where we see the warts of Carter. The man simply doesn’t understand politics and/or how to get things done in Washington. He inherits a legislative branch that is highly tilted in the Democratic party’s favor, yet Carter seems to alienate his own base far more often than the minority party on the other side. We constantly read about conflicts with Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and a host of other liberal democrats. Even Ed Koch, the Democratic mayor of New York City, can’t stand him. Carter, it seems, simply doesn’t want to play their politics game. He also manages to alienate the high-profile Washington press corps by avoiding silly things such as cocktail parties and refusing dinner invitations. He made a lot of enemies in Washington awfully quick. If you want to be successful in Washington, you just can’t do these things.
  
  We then must admit that he wasn’t a terribly exciting leader. Whenever Carter gave a speech or appeared on television, he always looked and sounded like a cat suffering from indigestion after eating a sour mouse. It seems like the man could never catch a break. We read about how he disappeared to Camp David for about ten days with no explanation as to why (presidents really aren’t supposed to do this), and when he comes back, delivers his infamous “malaise” speech, and then fires roughly half of his cabinet. And on and on and on.
  
  When it comes time for the 1980 presidential race, all I could think of was “Why on this Earth would this man WANT to run again after all he’s been through??”. So this is overall a sad account, yet incredibly truthful. It says an awful lot when an author such as Kai Bird who honestly thinks highly of his subject matter, is brutally honest when revealing his subject’s multitude of shortcomings.
  
  I loved this book. This was about 630 pages of reading material (not including sources, indices, etc.), yet I gobbled it up in less than a week. It greatly held my attention and I learned an awful lot about this particular time of history. In fact, there’s so much more I want to say about this book, but my review that I’m writing is already rather long. So I’ll conclude by saying: read this book. If you love history, you’ll love it.
• 
  Thom

  Excellent biography that focuses mostly on Carter's presidency and cabinet, the "Georgia Boys" who rubbed Washington society the wrong way. Uses declassified and recently recovered notes to great advantage.
  
  I've read some presidential biographies, but most enjoyed
  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. That book showed Lincoln's genius but also focused on the directions and goals of the men that worked with him. This book shows that some of Carter's "failing" is due to his cabinet, and why. In the end, this provides a complete picture of the presidency, which was rarely evident at the time.
  
  With over a hundred pages of notes and index, it is also an incredibly thorough book. Makes an excellent counterpoint to some of Carter's autobiographies about his boyhood in Georgia. Didn't contain enough about Carter's post-presidency, where he has become the new standard for a Christian life. May have to read
  Jonathan Alter's recent book on Carter to compare. Regardless, this book on his presidency is well worth reading.
• 
  Joe L

  A well researched and well written effort by Kai Bird. This is the latest in JC bios in the last few years.
  I take issue with his attempts to label Carter as a liberal. That assessment is way off the mark. By his own admission, Carter was more of a moderate dem while president. Indeed those moderate and even right leaning views upset left leaning dems such as Edward Kennedy time and again. Examples of this would be increased defense spending and cuts to social programs.
  To sum it up, Bird does his best to clean up a lot of Carter’s mistakes and blunders and inserts his opinions such as well “x decision” wasn’t so bad, other presidents had done it, etc.
  5/5, even with the whitewashing.
• 
  Lee Woodruff

  Jimmy Carter was my “coming of age” president and led through such a pivotal time in history.  This thorough biography takes an inside look at the man and the legacy…and reminds us of the many continuing gifts of a leader with heart. To this day Rosalynn Carter inspires so many with her focus on caregiving. Class acts.
• 
  Socraticgadfly

  Per reviewer Bill, with whose similarly long review I agree?
  
  "Too hagiographic" is the bottom line and what keeps this from five stars. (I've not read the Alter bio mentioned by him and one other 4-star reviewer, but it sounds like I maybe should.)
  
  When I saw this book at the library, being familiar with Kai Bird in general, and having loved “American Prometheus,” the bio of Oppie that he co-authored, I said “Gimme that.”
  
  At the same time, by the title, I was worried that Bird might put lipstick on our first neoliberal president.
  
  Well, my worries were somewhat unfounded.
  
  But, NOT totally unfounded.
  
  That said, some of those worries were partially offset in the epilogue.
  
  Bird, from back in his Georgia gubernatorial days, does sometimes gush over Carter. And, while he picked up a bit already then on Carter’s management style, he doesn’t really delve into the issue of whether this was THAT big a problem or not.
  
  In his early presidency, he doesn’t address the “phony” issue. For example, some Secret Service agents, in those tell-all books, have claimed that the “own bags” that Carter insisted on carrying? That luggage was empty. (The main one of such books says that Poppy Bush was, overall, the most considerate to the Men in Black and to White House staff.)
  
  Related, on the phony issue? He never addresses whether that smile was a real one, or whether it was often a practiced, rehearsed version of a fake smile or a real Duchenne smile. And, there are doctors who could relatively easily have told him that. Personally, I think about half his smiles, maybe more, are real. But all of them?
  
  He does address deregulation issues. (I made sure to hit the index before I got past the prologue, to make sure he did.) Bird does note the negative side on trucking, and somewhat on airlines, but there, he doesn’t tie Carter’s dereg there to the PATCO strike in Reagan’s first year. Nor, other than noting in a general way that this was a matter of concern to northern liberals, does he dive into just how anti-union Carter may have been.
  
  As for Carter the president? This quote is illustrative: “No president since Lyndon Johnson had achieved more legislative victories in his first year in office.” That actually says very little, of course. First, there were only two presidents between LBJ and Carter. Nixon was only a plurality president in 1968 and faced Dem majorities in both houses of Congress. (The GOP did gain five seats in both the House and Senate.) Ford, of course, was unelected and soon hung the Nixon pardon albatross around his own neck.
  
  The book is “interesting” in other ways. There’s little about the 1976 general election and NOTHING, other than a passing note that Scoop Jackson was one of his opponents, about the 1976 primaries. I mean, this was the last major party presidential primary run until the 2016 GOP where the eventual nominee took less than half the vote. Carter was actually a smidge under 40 percent, and Jackson only finished fifth in popular vote; even if you throw out California favorite son Jerry Brown, he was still a distant fourth. That said, Wiki’s piece on the 1976 Dem primaries is weak tea. Yes, I know this book is mainly about his presidency, but he covers Carter’s time as governor with more depth by far.
  
  OK, on to Carter’s two big presidential issues.
  
  Bird is very good overall on the Camp David Accords and everything leading up to them. He notes that Begin snookered Carter at the end. He had pledged that he would accept some written document sidebars, including one that spelled out details of a settlement freeze. Then, surely knowing everybody was in a hurry and Carter was in a rush to get back to D.C., gave Carter’s assistants a substitute document and never would submit what had been agreed-upon orally.
  
  Bird doesn’t get into analytic history and ask if this, plus the fact that Camp David was going to produce an Egypt-Israel deal, whether Carter should have pulled the plug on the whole thing. Yes, it eventually led to Oslo, but because Oslo gave Arafat three-quarters of a jelly roll, but denied the one-quarter that’s the sweet jelly, it was doomed to failure. (That’s my analogy on half-loaves of bread.)
  
  The other, of course, was the hostages. Here, Carter was both ill-served by others and ill-served by himself.
  
  If he was going to let the Shah into the US, then, at a minimum, given the earlier temporary hostage seizure, at least all remaining non-essential embassy personnel should have been evacuated. In reality, probably the whole embassy should have been.
  
  On the rescue attempt? Carter didn’t ask enough questions of Zbigniew Brzezinski on the big picture, or Col. Beckwith on the tactical details. Operation Eagle Claw was Delta Force’s first operation, after all. Special Command didn’t exist then. It was complex enough without all that as well.
  
  That said, Bird claims that the Shah would have lived for years more had he not been subject to bungled surgeries and “poor medical treatment at the hands of Rockefeller’s high-priced doctors,” claiming this is what actually killed him. He’s right, and why heart surgeon Michael DeBakey was doing a splenectomy is …. Interesting. Maybe the Shah asked, seeking a celebrity surgeon? But, Bird ignores that it wasn’t just Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, and David Rockefeller saying the Shah needed US-level medical care. Doctors in Mexico said so, too. And, before that, French doctors in Zurich saw that he had been given the wrong medication, and that his condition was worsening. Wiki’s entry on chronic lymphocytic leukemia says its five-year survival rate is 83 percent. Well, it was 5 years (or more) past diagnosis, and probably more than that since its inception. He probably would be at the 70 percent rate today, and even less than that in 1979. Per this piece, the Shah DID seem to be showing “progression” by the time of start of his exile.
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/... He was already on chemotherapy, his dosage had been raised, and he was told that, if he stayed in Mexico, the isotopes would have to be flown there. And, by the time DeBakey did do the splenectomy in Cairo, both the liver and pancreas reportedly had tumor nodules. Even without the damage to the pancreas, the Shah likely had only a couple of years left. Had the Shah been better served with less secrecy BEFORE his exile, he might have indeed lived a number of years longer. But, by the time we’re to early 1980, not so likely. So, Bird was less than fully right there.
  
  And, with that? Zbig vs Cy Vance. Bird does note early in the book that Carter was warned not to make both part of his administration, but he did anyway.
  
  (Carter was also advised to hire an actual chief of staff, but didn’t for three years until Ham Jordan got the job. Shades of Slick Willie, but for different reasons, on this issue.)
  
  Until Vance forced the issue by his own resignation over the attempted hostage rescue, the two had been at sixes and sevens, with Zbig getting more and more the upper hand the second half of Carter’s term, especially after Afghanistan. It was Zbig, who before the second 1979 revolution and Soviet intervention, who first started arming the mujahideen, but had little appreciation for the nuances of Afghanistan, including why the Soviets backed the second revolution. (We also supported the coup against Afghanistan's king before that, which helped destabilize the country.)
  
  And, Bird, even in the epilogue, doesn’t explain why Carter didn’t fire him, except noting Carter bemoaning Vance’s lack of loyalty.
  
  In reality? This appears to be another installation of Carter’s “smartest man in the room” arrogance.
  
  To wrap up? The title of the book is true. Carter, vis-à-vis the Washington establishment was an “Outlier” — and an “outsider.” Clinton was not totally either one, even at the start, and still got trashed. And, especially on Carter’s 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Bird omits a lot of stuff, like how Carter went right, and hard, in the Dem runoff against Sanders, like attacking him for supporting MLK.
  
  Summary? Bird has a lot of depth over the presidency itself, but lacks some elsewhere. Between that and some lack of analysis? Between that and not always fact-checking Carter? Can’t give him the fifth star.
• 
  Isaac

  These presidential biographies are sure to include any interactions between their subject and any individual who will hold the office in the future. As such I usually have at least a taste of the next guy from some cameos if not a supporting role in the last biography I read. This was not the case with Carter who seemingly left Georgia, probably barefoot and bare chested, and pretty much strolled right into the white house.
  
  Nixon's presidency ended abruptly and Ford pretty much went down with him when he pardoned Nixon. Several leading democrats self destructed during the primary and an obscure Georgia governor apparently scratched Americas post-Watergate itch for a Washington outsider.
  
  I doubt I'm alone in mostly knowing Carter as the cute little old guy pounding in framing nails for Habitat for Humanity. Based on that I was a little shocked at the size of this biography but I found it pretty lean and gripping throughout.
  
  The book skates pretty lightly over Carter's childhood, growing up in a county that was 80% black and somehow escaping the development of the racist attitudes endemic in the area. Joining the Navy and becoming a nuclear engineer only to abruptly quit when his father passed so he could tend the family peanut warehouse. Eventually he got into the Georgia state senate, then Governor, then President. The book also moves pretty quickly past the first few years of Carter's presidency; pardoning Vietnam Draft evaders, setting up the departments of Education and Energy.
  
  The back half of this book is mostly devoted to the Camp David Accords and the Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis. Bird does a good job keeping these complex diplomatic/geopolitical battles clear and for the most part exciting.
  
  After reading this book I liked Carter so much I can't help but wonder if he's real. Kai Bird does confess in the epilogue that he started this project right as Carter was diagnosed with brain cancer and I wonder if that may have caused him to defend Carter against the "unfair" criticism than he would've otherwise.
  
  Carter himself was a bit evangelical for my tastes, but he was principled and you have to respect how he ignored the political consequences of his decisions. I also think he lines up with me personally on the political spectrum as a liberal who strongly believes in the power of government to have a positive impact on citizens, but also a fiscal conservative whose willing to veto popular defense bills and civil works projects and crush the money supply to get inflation under control. He both deregulated where it made sense, like in the airlines and beer brewing industries but he also put in place seatbelt regulations that saved countless lives. He's a centrist in the best possible sense, willing to take the best policies regardless of where they lay on the political spectrum.
• 
  msleighm

  Audiobook. 5 stars.
  
  Thank you to the author and publisher, Crown, for this Goodreads giveaway, in exchange for a fair review. It was published June 15, 2021, I read nonfiction at a much slower pace than fiction.
  
  I was born in 1969, my political conciousness did not develop until the 80s with Ronald Reagan. Camelot and Nixon are well referenced, but I really didn't know anything about this one term president, other than he was a peanut farmer. This is why I entered the giveaway, even though nonfiction is more difficult for me to get through. I wanted to know more about this man, and a prize winning author should give me a better book (of course, one never expects to win these giveaways, but I was so pleasantly surprised).
  
  The chapters leading up to inauguration and following his defeat were the most interesting to me. The details about the presidency itself were very dense, often minute by minute. Other than the Camp David Accords and the Iranian hostages (which I knew about from prior reading), I wasn't interested in the minutiae.
  
  This was a president before his time, but thank goodness; without him, who knows where this country would be. If I had known more about him, I might have tried to work at the Carter Center after college graduation, the work he did there was very much in line with my interests.
  
  I have already recommended this book to several people. I can't say enough good things about it. It's eye opening and refreshing coming after another one term president, #45. If Carter was "before your time," like me, or you lived through the 70s and would like an intelligent retrospective, this book has so much to offer.
  
  Talking about the book, the presidency, and his life, a friend commented that at least he lived long enough to see so many of his passions succeed. According to the biographer, he died satisfied, and I can only suppose that's the best any of us can achieve.
• 
  Kyle

  Though the intricate details of Carter’s presidency are so expertly reported, Bird is at his best when he riffs—I couldn’t get enough of his commentary and analysis. But maybe I loved the riffs because of the painstaking research? Had I access to the two million pages of archives, painstaking detail would be such that reading anything I wrote would be painful. As a fellow Carter apologist, I’m thankful Bird did what he did: prove that Carter was ahead of his time and our expectations for what a president should be are too modern, and too cable-newsed for our own good. Bird makes clear that Carter saw it, and he did everything in his power to thwart it. But complexity just doesn’t sell all that well. A nod to Bird, and Carter, for diving into the complexity regardless.
• 
  WM D.

  Kai Byrd. The outlier president was a good book. Once I started reading it. I found very informative. It put Jimmy Carter’s presidency in a new light. A must read for anyone who likes political books
• 
  Cathy

  Crisply written narrative that pulls together the many threads of this under-appreciated president. I shook his hand at a rally at Union College in Schenectady back in 1976, when he was on the campaign trail, and voted for him enthusiastically. This book reminded me of the many complexities and challenges he faced during his single term; his noteworthy achievements, particularly in the areas of energy and peace, cause me to reflect a bit more on where we still need to go as a nation. I finished this biography roughly an hour before learning that this gracious 98-year-old man had begun to receive hospice care in his home. As we ponder the presidents on Presidents' Day, this biography makes a good case for Carter deserving a better public memory -- as president, regardless of his failings -- than he has enjoyed thus far.
• 
  Nader Rizkalla

  Carter’s one-term presidency was not the failure that some pundits claim it was, claims Kai Bird in this interesting biography and convincingly so.
  Carter was elected as the 39th president of the US on the merits of his characters. In the late 70s, the US was troubled with a loss of faith in the presidency thanks to Nixon. A Southern Baptist, conservative and Washington outsider with an unblemished political career seemed to be the right answer.
  But Carter was faced with unorthodox challenges. Stagflation due to persistent oil price hikes has left the Americans weary of a change from the post-war “abundance mentality” to the nuisance of scarcity of a basic commodity. Meanwhile, US institutions were taken by surprise by the fall of a reliable ally- Shah of Iran and the rise of an Islamic state with explicit animosity.
  
  However, Carter was not soft. His relentless will and over-confidence in his judgement that he is doing the right things made him capable of going into battles, external and internal, to execute on his agenda.
  Domestically, Carter was able to pass consumer-rights laws, deregulate airlines and transportation, implement energy policies and programs that led America to be independent of Middle East oil on the long-term. Internationally he adopted the Middle East crisis and was able to facilitate an unprecedented peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He also completed normalizing the relationship with China, sign SALT II agreement with USSR and execute the Panama Canal treaty.
  
  So what went wrong? His honesty and drive to do the right things during and after the elections has driven animosity with different sorts of people; Jews, democratic left, feminine activists and industry tycoons. Sadat- Egypt’s president at that time- summarized it well: “[Carter] is the most honorable man I know. Brilliant and deeply religious, he has all the marvelous attributes that made him inept in dealing with the scoundrels who run the world”.
  The Hostage crisis in Iran reveals exactly so. Carter was faced with a lobby led by Kissinger and Rockefeller that forced him to host the fallen Shah and directly led to the crisis. Carter was working relentlessly for a year to find a solution that save America’s face and ensures the safety of hostage. Meanwhile, the republican nominee, Regan, has made the back channel connection with Iranians to delay the release the hostages until after the election.
  
  Great book to read, and really it is time that Jimmy Carter gets his due.
• 
  Leslie

  Just could not finish. I've read so many books about Carter and Rosalynn I'm not sure why I'd begin another. Nothing against author, Kai Bird who writes well. I'd recommend if you're not already familiar with the rock and roll president and his very active and eventful life.
• 
  Russell

  Absolutely outstanding in every respect, Kai Bird's biography spends most of its pages covering Jimmy Carter's presidency, with a hundred pages or so about the formative experiences in his early years growing up in rural Georgia and maturing in the US Navy submarine forces. The general view of Carter's term in office is as a failure, but while Bird does not shy away from the things Carter could not achieve, he educates us fully on Carter's impressive accomplishments. Not least of these accomplishments is always striving to do the right thing in pursuit of justice and human rights despite the danger of drawing fire for his principled positions. Given the scars of the Trump presidency that are only slowly healing, if at all, it's refreshing to remember a President truly worthy of the title.