While this was broadly true, and the tension therein forged his character, his mother was a progressive on race mostly in comparison to her neighbors. Because no two presidents in the history of the republic are more unalike in character and temperament than this pair.

The long and continuing post presidency is also covered and is both the many excellent things he has done since leaving office and the less admirable recieve the proportionate attention.

In other ways, he experienced many of the technologies that were coursing through the twentieth century. Alter says: “Now that Trump is threatening the peaceful transfer of power, he’s very alarmed but he thinks that we’ll get past this. Perlstein is the pre-eminent chronicler of America’s conservative turn and my only caveat is that the casual reader might want to read his earlier books first to understand fully what’s going on. He wasn’t prioritizing peace over human rights so much as saying the former was a prerequisite for the latter.

In this biography Alter takes a fresh look at the man and argues, with some success, that he was a much better president than he is usually given credit for.

Conventional wisdom holds that he was a genial failure whose defeat by Ronald Reagan was sealed by humiliations such as the Iran hostage crisis and his claim to have been attacked by a “vicious-looking, oversized swamp rabbit” while fishing. Though only a fraction of the book tells of what has happened since he left office, it shows his dogged determination to keep making a difference whether building houses with Habitat for Humanity, observing elections, negotiating with dictators for peace or working to eliminate the horror of Guinea worm in Africa.