Customer Reviews

The Presidents Fact Book: Revised and Updated! The Achievements, Campaigns, Events, Triumphs, Tragedies, and Legacies of Every President from George Washington to Barack Obama

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is exactly what I was looking for! Includes basically everything you need to know about the history of our presidents in one volume. A huge volume...but still...one source and all in one place. The book is organized for quick reference, but also is simply a great read cover to cover. Being female, I particularly enjoyed the detailed write-ups on each of their wives. The rest discusses election details, selected members of their cabinets, important events and contributions as well as their mistakes and flaws. Each section has a biography of their lives, both before and after their presidency. Lots of great (black and white) photos too. Political cartoons and controversy included. I was unable to detect any political bias at all. The author could be democrat or republican or whatever. You can't tell from the content. Each president appears to be presented fairly and factually. Includes "the good, the bad, and the ugly"...no whitewashing, no excuses. Not your grandmother's history book, this one has some real substance, no fables. I am an avid reader and collector of American political history books, but if you can only own one book than this one is for you. It educates and entertains. Highly recommend.

I have a 17 year old daughter with Autism. She is obsessed with all things presidential, states and National Parks. When she opened this book she screamed. Of all her presents, this was her favorite.

Bought this for my child who is a history nut - loves to read all about the US presidents. Great book with lots of little tidbits.

This book is great if you want to know the bigger details about presidents, their vices & the first ladies. The one thing missing from the book is the results of the '04 election and I didn't see anything about John Kerry. (of course you can correct me if i'm wrong). Otherwise, it's worth the buy.

This book is a scholarly work, yet easy to read. It was well researched and well written. I found it to be very informative regarding the presidents and their wives. I bought it for "recreational" reading, and it did not disappoint me at all. Highly recommended for anyone interested in American history.

I was looking at this book in the library and was surprised at how misleading, biased, and false a lot of these "facts" are - and I had to put it down after reading about one President!

Although I am a Democrat, I am fascinated by Richard Nixon and his amazing number of accomplishments that are shadowed by the Watergate scandal. Little do many people know that Nixon had many liberal to moderate qualities that make him potentially appealing to open-minded Democrats and many other people. Yet the section on Nixon was mostly interested in twisting facts and diminishing the *overall* picture of a misunderstood and underrated President.

This book claims that Nixon cut many programs to increase defense spending. False! Look it up. The book words things in such a way that makes it sound like Nixon may have been guilty during the 1952 fund crisis, even though Nixon's deepest enemies still have nothing against him in the matter. The book underplays Nixon's most significant achievements, like starting the EPA, and gives Watergate a gross unproportional amount of coverage. There's plenty of other questionable material. By the end of his portion, you get such an inaccurate and biased point of view that you wonder why this was called a fact book at all. Don't like Nixon? That's fine, but if many things stated about him are wrong, who knows what is written here for every other President.

As another reviewer has already alluded to, this book is absurdly biased. It only takes seconds to realize the book is seriously screwed up. Sadly, there are quite a few books about presidents that came out after Obama was elected and you can see that nearly all of them were very anxious to re-write history through the eyes of conservative hating liberals. Amazingly the books were written right after Obama was elected and before he had done anything. That didn't stop them from devoting a huge section to Obama and all of his "accomplishments". Look at the date on this book. The sections on George Washington and Ronald Reagan, both multiple term presidents, aren't that much bigger than Obama's before he even had any time in office!

Just read the section on the economic policies of Reagan and that alone would put you off buying this disgrace of a book if you are even remotely fair minded. Basically it says that his policies took a long time (two years) to work and did little to help anyone who wasn't well to do or anyone who didn't have stocks.

It's funny because I have been in the lower middle class all of my life and after suffering through the nightmare that was Carter's presidency, Reagan seemed like a godsend. I guess the middle class and poor don't need jobs! I guess the poor aren't affected by ridiculously high inflation! I guess they're also not affected by 20% interest rates, and certainly giving the poor free food is of no use to them.

If you're a liberal who loves being told what you want to hear as opposed to the truth, this book is for you!