Wounded titans : American presidents and the perils of power /

In the aftermath of the 1996 election, readers who miss the magisterial pronunciamentos of the late Max Lerner, who spent "just short of a half century at [the] craft of president-watching," will relish this collection of Lerner's writings on a subject that preoccupied him, as editor Schmuhl (who heads the University of Notre Dame's American Studies department) suggests, like "Herman Melville's white whale." Lerner authored or edited 17 books and wrote literally thousands of newpaper columns, magazine articles, and public and academic lectures. Over the years, he began but never completed three different books about presidents he had known. Wounded Titans draws on unpublished material from those unfinished projects, in particular, providing penetrating portraits of presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, and Reagan, and includes insightful commentary, mainly from Lerner's columns, on every presidential election from 1940 to 1992. Appropriate for larger history and social science collections, especially where Lerner's other books have circulated well. --Mary Carroll

Edited and with an introduction by Robert Schmuhl, this is a hefty collection of the late Max Lerner's (1902-1992) writings on the American presidency. From a magazine article first published in the 1940s (on why FDR would be reelected), through essays that appeared in the 1950s (on presidential style and on how the cumbersome democratic system responds to crises), to his last newspaper column, published in 1992 (on judging presidents: Truman is his "hero"), the book reflects Lerner's dual career as both an academic and a journalist. He discusses Jefferson (our "philosopher king") and Lincoln, the role of eros and the presidency (focusing on Kennedy) and makes the hardly startling observation that, although Americans confer considerable grandeur on their elected leaders, presidents are in fact simply men, wounded titans. The shorter newspaper columns‘on-the-spot observations of presidents from Roosevelt to Bush‘fill about half the book and make for the more lively reading. The brief notes by Schmuhl, chair of the department of American studies at Notre Dame, set the stage nicely. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Part historian, part journalist, Russian-born Lerner (1902-92) brought broad background and progressive perspective to commentary on American political culture, assuring his place among 20th-century political columnists. Lerner was noted for his clarity and his criticism of rigid thinking. Schmuhl, a longtime friend of Lerner's and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, presents a useful collection of Lerner's works on the presidency, with special focus on the presidents Lerner covered‘FDR through Clinton. While he considered FDR the century's greatest president, he came to admire Truman the most. This volume would have been enhanced by a biographical survey evaluating Lerner and his place in political commentary. Recommended for specialized collections.‘William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The perils of posthumous editing have struck this anthology of presidential scrutinizing by America's premier pundit (Nine Scorpions in a Bottle, 1994, etc.), who died in 1992. Editor Schmuhl (American Studies/Univ. of Notre Dame) might have remembered that less is more; any political commentator whose career spanned half a century is by nature prolific and, no matter how brilliant, slightly redundant. Schmuhl makes some poor choices in selecting and organizing Lerner's work (one essay, ``Desire and Power in the White House,'' is simply an expanded version of its immediate predecessor, ``Eros and Power''). Ideas, structure, and even phrasing are duplicated throughout the collection. Most of these pieces focus on presidents of this century, though some attention is paid to Lincoln and Jefferson. The strength of the book is Lerner's voice, undimmed through 50 years of closely following the White House scene. His personal knowledge of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon give those portraits a powerful immediacy, and he is unflinching in his assessments of their effectiveness or lack thereof while in office. Roosevelt was ``the greatest president of the century,'' while Truman gets high marks in retrospect but not, the reader will notice, in Lerner's contemporary columns from Truman's era. Another section reproduces Lerner's play-by-play columns from the 1940 to 1992 political campaigns, profiling the issues, the victors, and the also-rans. As such, this section offers the most compelling you-are-there realism and stands in a direct contrast to the essays of the first section, which are quite reflective. The strong middle segment contains in- depth profiles of six commanders-in-chief. One wishes that Schmuhl had exercised a bit more restraint and foresight as editor, because the sum of this collection does not do justice to the richness of its parts.