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Harry S. Truman by Margaret Truman. Some of the highlight events of Truman’s Presidency were his sudden assumption to the Presidency, negotiations with Churchill and Stalin, dropping of the atomic bomb, the shift from a war-time to a peace-time economy, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin blockade, Palestine, the Korean War and the dismissal of MacArthur, thus reinforcing civilian control of the military. While these facts are carefully documented in his own memoirs, Margaret Truman, his daughter, shows the human side of the President, his feelings under the pressure of events during his Presidency. They also provide a good summary of the events and the principal people involved in them, She shows his sense of humor, his pride in his family, and his knowledge of history that often served to guide his actions.

 Yankee from Olympus: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Catherine Drinker Bowen. Although this book concerns primarily Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., i.e., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, spends time in the first quarter of the book describing in colorful detail, the grandfather, called Abiel, and Junior’s father, called Oliver or Dr. Holmes. The grandfather, Abiel, was a lawyer and Junior’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician and a writer of note.

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A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. When one member of his staff said he had had no training for the office that JFK was appointing him to, JFK replied that he, too, had had no education in how to be a President. They would both have to learn on the job. This book, together with Theodore Sorenson’s Kennedy tells the reader what JFK learned about being President.

Time Present, Time Past. Bill Bradley. Bradley wrote this book and others in order to become a Presidential candidate in the year 2000 election. Of course, he didn’t achieve his goal of becoming President, but his book offers a view of some of the issues other Presidential candidates need to consider: renewing people’s faith in the government, the problems of racism, uniting the many cultures in our society, urban education, the use of downsizing to increase corporate profits, and the nature of politics in the 21^st century. Bradley  wants to use Presidential power to alter the national self-perception.

The Uncommon Wisdom of JFK. Eds. Bill Adler and Tom Folsom. John Kennedy was a prolific reader. He thought deeply about government and life. He fully appreciated that America was a model for free societies. If America failed, society based on freedom would also fail. He appreciated the transience of life and was fully conscious that the atomic age could obliterate the earth. They were the times in which he lived and governed.

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Memoirs by Harry S. Truman. Vol. One. Read to understand the magnitude of Harry S. Truman’s achievement, the flexibility of his personality, the sophistication of his political skills and the application of his fundamental principles. Deep down, he was an angry politician who rarely showed his anger. This memoir belies his image of a small-town hayseed who somehow managed to stumble through his Presidency.

Memoirs by Harry S. Truman. Vol. Two. The second volume of Truman’s Memoirs concerns the major issues with which he had to deal after WWII: Russia and the Cold War; the Berlin Blockade; labor, management and the Taft-Hartley Law; Korea, Communist China; MacArthur’s revolt; the unbelievable Marshall Plan and, of course, his upset re-election to the Presidency.

Robert Kennedy and His Times, Vol. 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Schlesinger divides the topics in the book among RFK’s growing up; his shyness and feelings of inferiority to his brothers; his physical exertions; his mixed achievement in school; his work on Congressional investigations, including those concerned with corrupt unions; his work in organizing his brother’s Senatorial and Presidential campaigns; his work as Attorney General and his battle with institutional inertia, particularly the FBI and J Edgar Hoofer; his work with his brother on Civil Rights; his trips to foreign, unfriendly countries in which he confronted aggressive criticism of the United States, especially from the young; and his work with his brothers in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Robert Kennedy and His Times, Vol. 2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The second volume of this biography of RFK by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., covers the period of the assassination of his brother, his stormy relationship with LBJ, becoming the Junior Senator from New York, considering the vice-presidency under LBJ and, finally, when he realizes that Vietnam is tearing American society apart, the run for the Presidency that was aborted by his own assassination.

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Ask Not (JFK’s Inauguration Speech). Clarke. A good summary of the character of JFK and the politicians with whom he had to deal.

Best and the Brightest. Halberstam. The contrast between the Kennedy and LBJ style of leadership.

The Making of the President, 1960. Theodore H. White. Gives insights into the personalities and strategies of the Presidential candidates in 1960, won by John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy. Theodore Sorenson. Sorenson presents a comprehensive view of Kennedy’s ideas and methods of leadership.

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Abraham Lincoln. Prairie Years. Sandburg. A vivid re-creation of the youth and the times of Abraham Lincoln’s growing up.

Abraham Lincoln. War Years. Sandburg. An understanding of Lincoln’s principles of leadership in the Civil War and the profound change in the future of America because he was assassinated.

All Too Human: A Political Education. George Stephanopoulos. Behind–the-scenes view of Bill Clinton’s Presidency.

American Presidency. Clinton Rossiter. Thoughtful view of the powers and limitations of the American Presidency.

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From Time to Time. Jack Finney. Novel. While time travel is fantasy, the issue raised by both Time and Again and From Time to time, could become a serious problem. If we could travel back in time, what would happen if we tried to alter what actually happened in history?

A Handful of Dust. Evelyn Waugh. Novel. A portrait of the decadent British aristocratic world of the 1930s.

Decline and Fall. Evelyn Waugh. Novel. Paul Pennyfeather becomes a member of a dysfunctional faculty in a public school in England.

I, Claudius. Robert Graves. Novel. My research presented Claudius as far from the benign, scholarly narrator of Graves’ I, Claudius. He was as cruel as his predecessors and the emperors who followed him. The time of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula, and, following Claudius, Nero.

All the King’s Men. Robert Penn Warren. Novel. The complexity of a politician’s motivation.

Anthem. Ayn Rand. Novel. An antidote to the culture of melding the individual into the group.

As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner. Novel. Faulkner uses words to help the reader visualize the character, mood and even the weather in the South after the Civil War.

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The DaVinci Code. Dan Brown. Novel. Some people were afraid to read this novel because they thought it would destroy their faith. It is actually just an ordinary mystery/detective novel.

Poland. James A. Michener. Novel. Most of Michener’s “novels” are really loaded with information about his topics, almost an encyclopedia, but told in story form. Michener is Polish and he wrote this novel to help people in the rest of the world understand the peculiar circumstances that make Poland what it is—a country beset by large nations  that have torn it apart, brutalized it, yet produced people of courage who never give up trying to live productive lives.

The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud... Irving Stone. Novel. A fictionalized biography of Freud, and not one of Stone’s best. It often reads more like a textbooks than a novel. But it does explain Freud’s thought in readable prose so that ordinary people like me can understand his ideas.