Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge appears to have been all things that modern presidents rarely are: unfailingly humble, forged by circumstances that can only generously be called modest, and genuinely decent. At least that is how Amity Shlaes portrays the 30th president in his aptly-named tome, Coolidge.

Unfortunately, Coolidge's rise through Massachusetts politics and to the White House is, with all due respect to Amity's research and prose, rather dull. Or at least would not seem to require 500+ pages. I read diligently, closely event, for 250 or 300 pages and then decided life is too short to become bogged down in the minutiae of, for example, the Teapot Dome Scandal. (My patience was perhaps especially short having just slogged through another too-long bio - on the life and times of Jane Franklin.)

For those who wish to become intimately acquainted with Calvin Coolidge, you could not ask for more than what Shlaes delivers here. For those interested in a snapshot of the Coolidge administration, Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927 does an excellent job of providing just that and laying the groundwork for all that was to come - namely, Hoover and the Great Depression.