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MacDonald gives new life to this old American story of poor-white pride and prejudice. He also has a knack for quickly grabbing and holding a reader's attention. How's this for an opening line? "I was back in Southie, 'the best place in the world,' as Ma used to say before the kids died...
People have remarked that for me conversation is largely an excuse to quote "The Simpsons". Those who make it past this paragraph might conclude that this column has no other raison d'tre. And yet I assure the reader that for me, quoting from the show has always been a means...
Morris is also a brilliant writer--of both fact and fiction. His stylishness is so dazzling that the reader may want to forgive the manipulation he has employed. Again, this re-creates the experience of being around Reagan, who was so deeply likeable as a human being that even the most querulous reporter could be charmed into protecting him from his own vacuousness...
...however, the fact/fiction bipolarity erodes some of the book's brilliance. The reader begins to doubt Morris even when he describes events without resorting to dramatic trickery. His account of Reagan's summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland is so vivid as to make it seem Morris sat with the two leaders. In fact, Morris admits he was not there; he went to Iceland later and, relying on interviews, "enjoyed the scribe's traditional advantage of being able to recollect emotions in tranquility." Morris' brilliant portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's rise to the presidency was of course built from...
...Morris had a President who moved events. He seems to want to believe that to be true of Reagan as well. Morris says as much in the final, cloying scene of the book. He tells the reader that he himself was one of the people lifeguard Dutch saved from the river, and concludes: "Some day, I hoped, America might acknowledge her similar debt to the old Lifeguard who rescued her in a time of poisonous despair...