My Father at 100

February 21, 2011
Reagan’s beautifully written memoir is a conflicted tribute to a distant, almost mythical figure. Though he admits to being "quite close as father and son," the younger Reagan also considered his father "warm yet remote" and "intensely private." The son fares well in his first book-length foray, telling a surprisingly detailed story of his ancestors, analyzing examples of his father’s heroic exploits, and relating touching accounts of his final years. The author is more concerned with showing how his father found his way through the world as a young man than he is about pulling back the curtain on the father-son relationship, which is a pity. The few filial episodes he recounts are predictable tales of moderate adolescent rebellion. The writer’s wife emerges as the one person who tries—and fails—to push Reagan to examine deeper feelings. However, resentment is never far from the surface; his father’s criticisms and reliance on political confidants at his son’s expense seem to sting. "You’re my son, so I have to love you. But sometimes you make it very hard to like you," his father once said, a passing reference that reveals more about the father-son relationship than Reagan dares share directly.

January 1, 2011

Ronald Reagan's son seeks to understand his father by researching his formative years.

"He was easy to love but hard to know," writes the author, who disagreed with his father politically but loved him avidly. After the former president's death in 2004, Ron visited the locales, mostly in Illinois, where his father grew up, graduated from high school and completed college. His insights are admittedly speculative yet never outlandish. Ron, a political commentator for MSNBC, writes clearly and does not fall into the trap of inflating his role in his father's world. The author explains that although 90 percent of his father's thoughts and actions have been chronicled more or less fully, the remaining 10 percent requires explication. After all, President Reagan, as Hollywood actor and politician, was inscrutable to the point of wonderment among his family members, friends and professional advisors. Of the already published writings, the author credits Edmund Morris' Dutch (1999) as the most successful in capturing Reagan's elusive nature. It turns out, from the youngest child's perspective, that the president was as advertised: naturally sunny, without guile, devoid of cynicism, expert at creating his own worldview by reformulating his childhood experiences, turning cinema experiences into an ersatz reality and frequently invoking denial when unpleasant scenarios loomed. Toward the end of the book, the author shifts from genealogical researcher to you-are-there narrator, particularly as he recounts the assassination attempt on his father and the already elderly man's swift recovery from a nearly fatal bullet entry. Ron's recounting of the post-presidential decline because of dementia is honest and compelling, whatever the reader's assessment of the White House years.

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February 1, 2011

Ronald Reagan was "easy to love but hard to know," writes his son, Ron (not Jr., as he has a different middle name from his father) in this affectionate memoir, published on what would have been Reagan's 100th birthday. The book, primarily devoted to Ron's reflections as he visits Illinois locales and researches his father's youth at the Reagan Library, is the son's story of attempting to know his father better. The autobiographical component, which includes a few episodes of Ron's mild adolescent rebellion, is relatively small in comparison with Ron's efforts to reconstruct Ronald Reagan's internal narrative of his own life, one in which Reagan was "creator and star...director and story editor" of a production where, in early frames as a lifeguard and college football player, he learned to be a hero who would one day "save the world." VERDICT Ron Reagan, up against extant works by biographers, two sisters, brother, mother, and his father himself, may disappoint readers looking for much new information about the 40th President. But sometimes in awe of while sometimes bemused by his "square" of a dad, Ron delivers what many others have not, a down-the-middle portrait that admirers of his father and some memoir fans will likely enjoy.--Bob Nardini, Nashville

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.