JIMMY CARTER: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-Presidency (Hardcover)

by Peter G. Bourne (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
A perfect amount of time has elapsed for beginning a proper historical understanding of Jimmy Carter--enough to allow the emotions of witnesses and participants to cool, but not enough to overly dim their recall. And this book is a solid effort in that direction. Bourne, a psychiatrist, had known Carter for years before his presidency and followed him to the White House. (Which he left after getting caught prescribing drugs under a false name for one of his staffers.) This book is full-scale: it starts with Carter ancestors in 1635 and proceeds to describe in some detail the hard times characteristic of a place like Sumter County, Georgia. In Bourne's view, Carter's meteoric rise is best understood as the successive mastery of the narrow cultures of local, state, and national politics by a proud, intelligent man who had seen and understood the wider world (at the Naval Academy and then in nuclear submarines) before coming back to take over the family farm after his father's death. How meteoric? Well, Bourne tells us, Carter was elected President less than four years after stumping the panel on What's My Line?.

From Library Journal
The author of Fidel and a friend and former White House associate of Carter offers another biography of our 39th president.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First edition. edition (February 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684195437
• ISBN-13: 978-0684195438
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #622,714 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #31 in	Books > History > United States > 20th Century > 1970s

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your Friendly Neighborhood Peanut Farmer...!, September 19, 2000

By	Sam (Gaithersburg, Maryland) - See all my reviews

I walked through the isles of my public library looking for something to read. There was a large book with the words ' JIMMY CARTER' written on it that was sticking out of a shelf. I picked it up and decided to read it. This has been one of the best choices for reading I have ever made. Jimmy Carter is an extrodinary man, who's life is a lot more detailed and complex than I would have thought. This biography traces his life from birth, through the Navy, State Senatorial duties, Governorship and his Presidency. Jimmy Carter is shown as the admirable and honest man that he is. A real role model for all, Jimmy Carter is amazing, and so is this book.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a top notch presidential biography, December 19, 2005

By	Thomas A. Wheeler (Cottage Grove, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Over the last several years I've read more than 35 presidential biographies, usually taking the advice of Amazon readers who have steered me toward the best available choices. While not among the very best of biographies, Bourne's effort is near or in the top ten presidential biographies.

Jimmy Carter is probably the most intelligent president of my lifetime, an extremely hard worker, ambitious, very religious and thoughtful about his religion but also willing to compromise his principles to get ahead. He is also stubborn and not willing to be shown up. He has usually viewed himself as an outsider, and while this helped convince Americans to elect him president, it did not prepare him to work well with Washington politicians and insiders to achieve many of his goals.

Along with describing Carter's life prior to the presidency, the first half is fascinating for its description of race and politics in the South during the 60's and 70's, laying out an outline of how to win the presidency through a grass roots campaign, the suspicion that Carters religious beliefs caused, and as a reminder of issues that campaigns focused on in the 70's (election ethics, environmental issues, education reform, national health insurance, and other populist sorts of themes) - the four year campaign for president is told in detail (150 pages), and in ways it seems overly long, but this is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Carter's life. The strategy and effort to elect an unknown governor to be president is pretty fascinating stuff.

I started to fear Bourne would run out of energy and pages to provide much detail about Carter's presidency. I was wrong. He captures the problems Carter and America faced, the often ineffective policy implementation of the Carter White House, and Carter's unwillingness to compromise or "play the game" with Congress. Carter's post-presidential years are cevered well.

Bourne has been a Carter advisor for nearly 30 years, but his book is balanced and thoughtful. He is not shy about criticizing Carter. Bourne writes well, and kept my interest throughout the narrative. In some ways the book appears to be published on the cheap. Double spacing between sections doesn't happen. There is no table of contents or chapter names. Despite these few limitations this is a highly recommended presidential biography.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Making of the Man and the Crumbling of the Presidency, November 5, 2006

By	Steve Fast (Hillsboro, KS, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Bourne shows how the the Carter family values and the values of the South shaped Jimmy and the impact that these values had on his presidency. His father's frugality and work ethic are manifest throughout Carter's life, while his mother's racial tolerance and kindness are as well. But his blind devotion to principle and weak managerial skills hindered relations with Washington power brokers and ultimately damaged his presidency.

Some of the most interesting reading is how Carter won the White House, coming from a complete unknown and total outsider to become the most powerful man in the world. And Bourne does an excellent job describing the election campaign. A surprising subtheme of the book is how some of the elements of the Reagan revolution were foreshadowed in Carter's policies, such as the emphasis on a strong defense and confronting the Soviets.

One weakness of the book is the author's hatred of the Reagan administration. He can hardly mention Reagan's name without calling him racist, a charge that is baseless as far as I know. He also assumes that the charges that Reagan interfered in the Iran hostage release in order to win the election are true without discussing the evidence. As far as I know, the evidence for this is controversial at best. Finally, the discussion of his administration could have been better organized--I could not determine if it was chronological or thematic.

The book reveals the complexity of Carter. Although he participated in Southern Baptist Home Mission Board outreach programs, he was either pro-choice or pro-abortion. Although he did more for blacks as governor of Georgia than any previous governor, he was also a supporter of the arch-segregationist George Wallace. Although he was willing to sacrifice almost anything for principle, he ran some awfully dirty campaigns for office in Georgia. Bourne is to be commended for not shying away from describing these complexities.

Bourne was the health advisor for part of the Carter administration, so this is definitely an insider view of his presidency. But Bourne does a good job describing all of Carter's life, from childhood to Navy service to Georgia politics to the presidency to post-presidency, ending with Carter's 70th birthday in 1994.

Overall, a good biography, although it inevitably suffers from being written by an insider and by the lack of historical distance from the main actor. But you will come to know Carter in his glories and his failings.