Very good. Coolidge is not the most interesting guy but the book is engaging and did justice to Cool Cal. ( )

A good biography, not a great one. Sobel apologizes for using secondary sources for this bio - there's nothing new here but presentation and emphasis - but this does not mean it is a bad book or that you won't learn anything. Sobel introduces his readers to one of America's great presidential sphinxes, even more sphinxy than Thomas Jefferson, the inimitable Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge, often presented as a dour, lazy, do-nothing of a President was, in fact, a hilarious, patient, calculating President. Impulsive he was not, but he still wrote poetry, wrote all his own speeches, and was smart enough to realize that the President does not run the country, he is the nation's steward-in-chief. (Oh! If current occupants of the White House only understood that!) Coolidge had stern ideas: freedom means freedom from the government, that is, regulations, over-burdening taxation, and so forth. Let the people catch up to legislation, don't try to herd the people with legislation. Coolidge's pithy orations are legendary, and he deserves to be known as one of the wittiest wits the Office has ever seen. This book opens some eyes. Far from being a do-nothing President, he was a shepherd. Far from being the pawn of big-business, Coolidge was, at times progressive by the standards of his day.

A fine example of the reevaluation Sobel pushes you towards concerns the most often given Coolidge misquote: "The chief business of America is business." In fact, he said: "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." A different thing altogether. He followed that with the almost never quoted: "Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence." Totally different, utterly and completely. In the same speech too, he said this: "We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists."

The moral? The 1920s was not a time of rapacious greed, of big-business cozying itself up to government, of an alliance betwixt Wall Street and Philadelphia Avenue. No, no, no. Coolidge was the last President who trusted the American people, not the government of a few in Washington who must dictate to the American people because, otherwise, they are too dumb to do anything of their own accord. ( )