#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,
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,
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.
is an affecting portrait of a man who, driven by destiny and by duty, forever sought, ultimately, to put the country first.