Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

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Random House Publishing Group, 2015 M11 10 - 864 pages
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “illuminating” (USA Today) biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham chronicles the life of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Destiny and Power reflects the qualities of both subject and biographer: judicious, balanced, deliberative, with a deep appreciation of history and the personalities who shape it.”—The New York Times Book Review

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Drawing on President Bush’s personal diaries, on the diaries of his wife, Barbara, and on extraordinary access to the forty-first president and his family, Meacham paints an intimate and surprising portrait of an intensely private man who led the nation through tumultuous times. From the Oval Office to Camp David, from his study in the private quarters of the White House to Air Force One, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to the end of Communism, Destiny and Power charts the thoughts, decisions, and emotions of a modern president who may have been the last of his kind. This is the human story of a man who was, like the nation he led, at once noble and flawed.

From the Pacific to the presidency, Destiny and Power charts the vicissitudes of the life of this quietly compelling American original. Meacham sheds new light on the rise of the right wing in the Republican Party, a shift that signaled the beginning of the end of the center in American politics. Destiny and Power is an affecting portrait of a man who, driven by destiny and by duty, forever sought, ultimately, to put the country first.
 

Contents

one The Land of the SelfMade Man
3
WAR AND MARRIAGE 1942 to 1948
48
TEXAS AND TRAGEDY 1948 to 1966
81
THE WARS OF WASHINGTON 1966 to 1977
129
THE AGE OF REAGAN 1977 to 1989
209
twentyone Is George Bush There?
242
Twentysix On the Eve of the Run
293
TwentyseveN Like Youve Been Hit in the Stomach
313
THE AWESOME RESPONSIBILITY
352
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About the author (2015)

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.

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