Top Ten Tuesday: Books About Presidents

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish. Today’s topic was a freebie and I chose books about presidents since it is election day and, you know, I love presidential history. 

• Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard: A brilliant, engaging history of President James Garfield, a man whose political potential was cut short by assassination, as well as the medical situation and labor issues of his time.
• The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy: This book never feels gossipy, which is impressive when you consider that the entire book is about the relationships between presidents and their predecessors. There’s a lot of fascinating information here about the often complicated relationships among the few men who have held the role of leader of the United States and the respect all of them have, despite party identification, for the office of the presidency.
• The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller: I can almost guarantee that this is the most interesting book you will find about President McKinley.
• All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: A recount of the dramatic way the two young reporters were able to uncover the Watergate scandal. I read the entire book on a bus ride to New Hampshire.
• Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein: This book isn’t just about Nixon; it’s about the politics and political landscape of his time and how it has influenced the political situation we find ourselves in today. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Perlstein, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, also has a book about Barry Goldwater that I really need to get my hands on.
• The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro: I cheated a bit with this one–I’m still reading it. Lyndon Johnson was a fascinating man. This is the fourth book in Caro’s series on LBJ, and it covers LBJ’s time as Vice President and the beginning of his presidency after the traumatic murder of President Kennedy.
• Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zacks: I don’t really like Teddy Roosevelt, but this book is an interesting look at his time as police commissioner of New York.
• Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman: I can’t put it better than the blurb, so: “SCORPIONS tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.”
• The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 by Evan Thomas: It’s funny how I don’t really like Teddy Roosevelt but I have two books about him on this list. I love the tie-in with Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s best friend, and William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper giant, and how they pretty much made the Spanish-American War happen.
• Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell: My favorite Vowell book. She visits the sites of presidential assassinations and is funny and factual and pretty much should be my best friend.