Title: Not Terribly Illuminating Material
Product review: 84% of the book is Reagan's handwritten drafts of his radio punditry from 1975 to 1979. Reagan liked to take a small selection of what for him amounted to fact and build a conservative argument around it. Sometimes it's convincing, sometimes it's less so, but nearly always it's pretty boring stuff. Reagan's genius was his simple vision of what America could be if it stopped apologizing for itself. The way he energized his staff to that end when he became President is the real story of his uniqueness (George Shultz' Foreword is perhaps more illuminating in this respect). The material in this book does little to advance our understanding of that uniqueness. And of course wading through the crossed-out prose and the bad spellings merely becomes tedious after awhile. It might be excellent for Reagan groupies or serious historians, but it is hardly great reading fare for the rest of us.
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