As a former White House correspondent, I have a particular interest in the history of "the people's house" and the American families that have occupied it--a history that "Real Life at the White House" makes endlessly compelling. The father-daughter authors John and Claire Whitcomb present a wealth of fascinating anecdotes, especially about White House living conditions. President Benjamin Harrison was not pleased to find a rat on the dining-room side table; Lyndon Johnson, unhappy with the water pressure, had shower heads and a floor jet put in (Richard Nixon removed it). In perhaps the most moving section of the book, LBJ's daughters relate how life under the high ceilings of the White House can be a lonely time for any First Family.
I don't read fiction, for the good reason that I find far more excitement in history--particularly the sort of history to be found in Doris Kearns Goodwin's towering work on the wartime presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. "No Ordinary Time" evokes FDR's world--you can smell the Persian rugs and the overflowing ashtrays. She re-creates, meticulously, the World War II White House--the dysfunction, the achievements, a certain perpetually pickled cigar-smoking houseguest from Britain, all of it. The floors creak, FDR works his charms and the cocktail shaker marks the start of the "social hour," when all talk of the titanic struggle that was under way on two global fronts was meant to cease. Fiction is no match for this stuff.
"When Trumpets Call" is a superb, almost tactile examination of the journey that began on the day Theodore Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909, at age 50, and ended with his death in 1919. Patricia O'Toole beautifully chronicles the physical and intellectual restlessness that fueled the last decade of TR's life. His first project as a private citizen was to embark on an African safari. It was meant to be a low-key getaway from his clamorous public life, but it quickly turned into an expedition "of biblical proportions," O'Toole writes. TR's break from presidential politics was also short-lived: He campaigned as a third-party candidate in 1912, burnishing his legend by insisting on giving a speech in Milwaukee even though he was bleeding from a gunshot wound in the chest after a failed assassination attempt. TR's life was "one of the longest-running, most colorful serials in American history," O'Toole says, a story "by turns exhilarating, exasperating, amusing, and inspiring."
While Hollywood's 2002 version of "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young" was careful to be true to the book, there is no substitute for the original. And it has never been more timely. If the heroics herein are stirring and inspiring--in the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam in 1965, 450 American troops find themselves in a desperate fight against 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers--the military and bureaucratic miscalculations are staggering and infuriating. The 9/11 attacks provided a perverse postscript: Rick Rescorla, an Army infantryman who survived at Ia Drang and is pictured on the book's cover, was killed in the World Trade Center attack.
Bill Bryson has done a better job of capturing the post-World War II era than any sociological work I can think of. And this memoir of his Iowa boyhood years--the TV, the movies, the food (leftovers were essential)--is far, far funnier. It was the era when, as Bryson writes, every week brought exciting news of things becoming better, swifter, more convenient. And nothing was too preposterous to try. Not long after I began reading the book (a gift from my wife) on a flight to Iraq, I was laughing so hard that I started heaving and weeping in my seat. I'm quite sure the flight attendants briefly considered turning the plane around. "The Life and Times of a Thunderbolt Kid" is more than just a break from combat, politics and global strife: It is sheer joy.