January 21, 2012 – 11:22 am
Millard Fillmore, by Paul Finkelman
So I told you guys last month that Zachary Taylor was actually pretty sweet for how unknown he is and the length of his presidency (only about 18 months). The biography that I read talked about how had he lived, the civil war may had been totally avoided. The weird part? [...]
December 28, 2011 – 5:35 pm
Zachary Taylor, by John S. D. Eisenhower
Is it bad that my general opinion of Zachary Taylor came from a little, brief mention on 30 Rock? Yup. I’m a total idiot.
Most of the other presidents, even if I didn’t know much about them going into this challenge, had begun to take shape for me before [...]
December 18, 2011 – 9:40 pm
The Book: Always Looking Up, by Michael J. Fox
The Story: After Michael J. Fox quit working on Spin City due to Parkinson’s, he was kind of depressed- day-to-day life was a struggle and after years and years in front of the camera, he felt bored and lonely. He decided to use his disease, his fame, [...]
November 28, 2011 – 9:59 am
Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, by Walter R. Borneman
Unlike several of the presidents in this little “between Jackson and Lincoln” clump, I had actually heard of Polk and knew a teeny bit about him. I knew that he was in some way involved in the Mexican American war (although I [...]
October 29, 2011 – 10:40 am
The Book:Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
The Story: This is the story of Steve Jobs’ life: his youth, his family, his beliefs, and primarily his successes and failures at Apple and his other companies.
Steve Jobs is one of these modern “celebrities” that has been part of the tech revolution since its earliest days. He and Steve [...]
October 26, 2011 – 8:52 am
John Tyler, by Gary May
John Tyler is one of those forgotten presidents. He was the first vice president to take over after the death of a president and to be perfectly honest, he didn’t really do much in office. He got himself really hooked on Texas and slavery and tried to get stuff done in [...]
John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, by Paul C. Nagel
Let me just start by saying that this was not one of the biographies that I was really excited about. After reading John Adams, I kind of thought that I had a pretty basic idea of JQA’s life and thought this would be [...]
The Book: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, by Paul Hoffman
The Story: Paul Erdos is a math legend. He contributed more papers, solved more problems and made more mathematical discoveries than just about anyone in history.
As you may imagine, he was a pretty quirky [...]
The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, by Harlow Giles Unger
Alright, there are a lot of little things that I want to talk about that have absolutely no relation to one another so bulleted list it is!
Harlow Giles Unger is maybe the best historian name I’ve ever heard of. And [...]
American Sphinx, by Joseph Ellis
Something that I’m already noticing about these presidential biographies as I make my way through them is just how much overlap there is. Reading John Adams, I learned almost as much about Thomas Jefferson as I did about John Adams. For most of their political lives they were on a pretty [...]