Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands. The two great presidents of the 20th century—intriguingly, from diametric opposite ends of the political/economic spectrum—are Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. But it has taken a decade since Reagan’s passing for there to appear a rigorous, fair-minded one-volume biography. (Remember that the “official” biographer, the world-class Edmund Morris, was so confounded by the enigmatic Reagan that he produced the incomprehensibly bizarre Dutch: A Memoir.) It takes—as they say in Texas, where Professor Brands teaches at UT Austin—a lot of damn gall to subtitle this first effort of its kind the rather than a life, but he actually pulls it off. Nor does he neglect to give us an astonishingly good read: his chapter on Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik is the most lucid I’ve read. FDR and Reagan were certainly opposed in their political philosophies. But they were alike in their supreme faith in America’s future, and that’s the quality that shines through this luminous biography.
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs—published within a month of its subject’s death—could hardly have been expected to be definitive, however much one admired it for its timeliness. And over time, it has become clear that no few people who were quite close to Jobs disagreed fundamentally with Isaacson’s half-genius, half-jerk characterization. Thus this new volume is most welcome. Based on the primary author’s quarter-century acquaintance with Jobs, its key idea is the first word of the title: to Schlender, Jobs was always in the process of becoming. The book does not absolve Jobs of his titanic faults, but portrays a person gradually but significantly growing out of many of them. It would have been fascinating to see how the man in full might have turned out.