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  • Coolidge: An American Enigma

  • By: Robert Sobel
  • Narrated by: Charles Bice
  • Length: 16 hrs and 53 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)
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Coolidge: An American Enigma

By: Robert Sobel
Narrated by: Charles Bice
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Summary

In the first full-scale biography of Calvin Coolidge in a generation, Robert Sobel shatters the caricature of our 30th president as a silent, do-nothing leader.

Sobel instead exposes the real Coolidge, whose legacy as the most Jeffersonian of all 20th-century presidents still reverberates today. Sobel delves into the record to show how Coolidge cut taxes four times, had a budget surplus every year in office, and cut the national debt by a third in a period of unprecedented economic growth.

Though his list of accomplishments is impressive, Calvin Coolidge was perhaps best known and most respected by his contemporaries for his character. Americans in the 1920s embraced Coolidge for his upstanding demeanor, which came as a breath of fresh air after the scandal-ridden administration of Warren G. Harding. The sleaze that characterizes much of American political life today was absent in the Coolidge administration.

©2000 Robert Sobel (P)2011 Robert Sobel

Critic reviews

"Sobel succeeds at getting the reader to take a serious look at this oft-neglected and sometimes disparaged president, and his tightly argued, well-researched book will be of importance to historians and presidential scholars for years to come." ( Library Journal)
"Sobel, who has previously written on the politics of economics, strives to provide a more balanced portrait of a surprisingly complicated and interesting man." ( Booklist)

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An excellent and satisfying biography

An excellent and satisfying biography of one of the great, if underrated, US Presidents and the era in which he lived.

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