At the moment, I am engrossed in former US President Ronald Reagan's memoirs, "An American Life". The book is very readable, very engaging and extremely interesting. After reading a few chapters, my mind started to wander to the question of presidential memoirs in general. How many presidents have done presidential memoirs, which one is considered the best, which one is considered the worst, is it a given that when a president leaves office he is basically obligated to write a memoir and so on.I turned to my trusty friend, Mr Google, and tried to find out. I found an extremely interesting and informative article on How Stuff Works which answered some of my questions. For a start, not all presidents have written memoirs, either because they didn't want to, perhaps it wasn't the fashion at the time to write memoirs and also because some presidents died in office so they never had the chance to write their memoirs (Roosevelt and Kennedy being the 20th century's two prime examples).
Some presidents decided not to bother, the best example being George H W Bush. He instead wrote a book based on his correspondence to people which gave a brief glimpse into the first Bush administration but it seems he didn't bother chronicling his entire presidency.
Plus reading this article made me realise today's trend for potential presidential candidates to write their memoirs. So we have memoirs by John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean and even one by George W Bush when he was Texas Governor and Presidential candidate. It could be argued however that these books are not really heart-felt memoirs but actually campaigning tools and if the person loses the election, their memoirs eventually fade into obscurity.
I am considering collecting US presidential memoirs. Maybe in years to come, they will become scarce and valuable and I might end up cornering the market. I can but try.
Labels: books, memoirs, president |
