Customer Reviews

The Presidential Book of Lists: From Most to Least, Elected to Rejected, Worst to Cursed-Fascinating Facts About Our Chief Executives

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This book contains 104 lists of trivia about the 43 American presidents from 1789 through March 2008. Each entry contains a paragraph of text about that particular president. Many of these lists compile interesting bits of information, such as "The Five Presidents Who Issued The Most Vetoes" and "The Presidents on U.S. Paper Money". However, much range from the widely known ("The Four Presidents Who Were Assassinated", "The Four Presidents on Mount Rushmore") to the dull and obscure ("Presidents Who Shared Birthdays/Death Days With Vice Presidents"). The genealogical lists grow tiresome with minutia like "Benjamin Harrison and Jimmy Carter are probably sixth cousins, three times removed". Much of the supporting text is repeated between a President's numerous appearances on several different lists. The book culminates in "The Average President": a list of statistical averages for about 40 criteria.

The Presidential Book of Lists hearkens back to a time when many publishers released trivia books in the form of factual lists. The book presents information about the United States presidents in a variety of lists, allowing the reader to appreciate the role of the chief executive of the country in a new light. One section of the book is devoted to the "average" president, in which the author lays out those traits that presidents have mostly had in common over the 200+ years of the USA. Trivia buffs and people interested in politics and history will return to this book time and again to learn something new.

I love presidential trivia, learned a few things, but had some major problems with this book.

As one of the other posters mentioned, a lot of the lists are the very obvious ones. In addition to who's on Mt. Rushmore and presidents who were assassinated, I might also cite Buchanan as the only bachelor and presidents on coins.

At the same time, there are also lists that are quite obscure. In addition to the presidents and vice-presidents who died on the same day that was already mentioned, I'd also cite presidents who were the greatest number of years younger (or older) than their predecessor, presidents whose wives outlived them the longest (or vice versa), and presidents who had all their siblings live to see them take office.

The repetition that the other poster mentioned is really quite annoying. You know the "(see above)" citations in the excerpts? Well, they're all spelled out in the book. This was a particular problem in lists, like those above, that were very closely related. And there are quite a number of them - presidents who outlived the greatest number of successors, presidents older than the greatest number of their predecessors, presidents who had no living predecessors, presidents who had the most living predecessors, time periods when the most former and current presidents were alive.

Another related and very annoying thing the author does is to spell out obvious details every time the patricular president is mentioned. For example, instead of just listing the youngest presidents and their ages, for each he'll say something along the lines of "Joe Jones, who was 45 years and 15 days when he succeeded Bob Smith on Jan 20th 1926 and remained in office until Jan. 20, 1930 after he was defeated by Jim Johnson." Just a simple "Joe Jones - 45 years and 15 days" would have been more than enough. (Of course, the book might have been 50 pages in that case.)

Now, if the author wanted to add a little tidbit or two to make things interesting, that would've been great. For example, under occupations, the author lists the lawyers, politicians, businessmen, etc., but fails to mention interesting things like Truman being a haberdasher or Ford being a model and park ranger.

In fact, that seemed to be a real drawback of the book. If the data wasn't easily quantifiable - height, age, time in office - the author simply wasn't that interested. Some of the very interesting possibilities this left out include causes of death, medical conditions, hair color, baldness, hobbies, sports, heritage, left-handedness, affairs, illegitimate children, musical instruments, firsts (to be photographed, use a phone, ride in a car, etc.), etc., etc.

I did like the average president and also the debunking of the David Atchison story, but overall the book was boring and rather incomplete.

I have to say all in all this book is disappointing. I will say that it does provide a series of lists around various facets of the presidency. What it lacks is some type of structure or order, other than listing out random presidential acts. For one thing there are no courageous stands taken like what were the 5 biggest presidential scandals of all time. A great part of reading these books is having friendly discussions and arguments about whether the list is right or wrong or what. Let's be honest you can't argue about how many presidents were buried in New York or even how many were left handed (a cool list missing from the book)

This is really a weak and lame book and while big history geeks like me may read it for a chuckle, don't waste your money on it.

There are lots of interesting facts presented here. I really enjoyed it. I've always been interested in presidential trivia and thought I knew quite a bit about the subject. All I can say is wow, Strock knows his stuff.