Reagan: the life. H. W. Brands. 2015.

In this new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents o the twentieth century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan shows how the confident force of Reagan’s personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, ….and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are till powerfully felt today.

Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the voice of General Electric Theater on television made him an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began Reagan’s improbable political ascension, starting in the 1960 when he was first elected governor of California, and culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the United States.