Thank you Amazon for having such a great return policy for that is where this piece of dreck is going. Growing up Catholic and attending a Catholic school I feel that my eighth grade history book gave me a better knowledge of the past presidents. I believe that this book was written, not by just the advertised author, but by a team of disassembled writers with no knowledge of what the others were writing. Having never purchased any of his books prior to this one, I thought that this would be a good addition to my history library, but I was wrong. After receiving this little try at history, I went straight to the middle, the last of the 1800s and the launch of the 1900s, yes that is correct, the McKinley/Roosevelt period. Very disappointing! He fluffs off everything that McKinley worked so hard for, but makes the childlike disposition of Roosevelt seem miraculous. McKinley was a political minded man of vision, from his tariffs, that created wealth, to his Gold Standard that brought our country to the top of the world's strongest. He was the first modern president with countenance and magnality. Most Americans embraced the idea of American greatness, and in those times that meant expansion, colonies, global trades, and a big navy that required coaling stations around the world. Our nation required bold new ventures into the world and McKinley gave us world respect that broke us out of isolation, leveraged global position in the Pacific, and emerged the United States as the world's greatest industrial nation. He made the world listen. He helped disintegration of China, his navy squashed Spain freeing Cuba, and giving this nation the territories of Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. He also had the Hawaiian Islands vote in our government as it's protectorate over others that wanted this Pacific Pearl. I could do a chapter just for the way he had his Front Porch presidential campaign to his long and sorrowful death by a foreign anarchist. Then I looked at the section on the childlike Roosevelt, stumbling up a hill and becoming a bully who played and took all of the ideas that he had inherited from his predecessor, McKinley, from building a navy to the Panama Canal. He lived for play, with many toys, but this book contains his folly as if it was meritorious. You may want a brief picture story book but this book is not for this historian. NO THANKS.

Ordered it as soon as possible. Received it on 9/10. Can't put the book down. Since history is slowly being eliminated by the current generation, this book is a must read for all generations if you are interested in our presidential history. Very well laid out, interesting and gives such a great understanding of the victories, failures, obstacles and habits of each president

This book has a ton of history, about these people, the bad and good. Lots of personal stuff, yeah FDR wife was a switch hitter. But, all these men mostly were just average, with the same problems we have today, and the animosity was as bad then as now. But great read on history, recommended.

I am a presidential historian. In fact, I am the Founder of the Society of Presidential Historians in Academia (SOPHIA). sophiascholars.com Many historians might thumb their nose at this book, deeming it not "scholarly," but I don’t share that view. Confronting the Presidents is historically accurate, eminently engaging, refreshingly objective, and highly entertaining. Far too many scholarly history books are written to preserve the historical record, and that’s important. But consequently, they contain painstakingly dry and often excruciatingly boring detail. But this book is chock full of information that's easy to digest, so the reader's eyes can easily glide from page to page. Bill O'Reilly (assisted by Martin Dugard) devotes a chapter to each president, from Washington to Obama, understandably omitting Trump and Biden, who at the time of writing were running for president again; O'Reilly focuses only on presidents who were done. O'Reilly engages the reader in dramatic fashion with chapter-openers such as: "George Washington is mad as his mother" (p. 3, describing a longstanding feud between the two), "The Executive Mansion [now the White House] is ablaze" (p. 33, when the British invaded and set fire to Washington, DC during the War of 1812), "Franklin Pierce needs a drink" (p. 108, explaining that president's propensity to consume large amounts of alcohol), and "The President of the United States is stuck" (p. 215, referring to William Howard Taft's large 350-pound body being stuck in the tub during his baths). I knew all of those things ahead of time, as well as most of the numerous other fascinating facts O'Reilly describes, because presidential history is my field. But I learned some new interesting tidbits too, such as: A few years before becoming president and leader of the Confederate Army, respectively, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee worked together to coordinate incoming President Zachary Taylor's inauguration festivities (p. 98), that Taylor and his running mate Millard Fillmore never met face-to-face until after they won the election (p. 104), that Gerald and Betty Ford were the first president and first lady to sleep in the same bedroom in the White House (p. 333), and that Barack Obama is fluent in Indonesian (p. 383). The book is remarkably objective until the Afterword, when O'Reilly and Dugard show their hand and tell us what they think of Trump and Biden, and we finally learn that Dugard, who's been collaborating with O'Reilly on books for years and years but has mostly remained in the shadows, in contrast to the conservative-minded (but registered independent) O'Reilly, is a liberal! That in my mind adds gravitas to their work, as they can assess matters from varying perspectives. The only disappointment I have with a book this rich in presidential anecdotes is that there aren't any cited sources. Oh, it's not that I doubt the information's veracity (like I said, I already knew most of it and have no doubt to believe that any of it is inaccurate); it's just that footnotes/endnotes are helpful to those interested in further reading. What may seem like frivolous presidential trivia to some is in my view what makes this book so valuable: that George Washington didn't attend his mother's funeral (though, in fairness, it's been said that the news didn't get to him in time) and never had a headstone put on her grave (no excuses for that one). It's important because we tend to vilify our modern-day presidents, yet we all but declare holy those on Mount Rushmore. But here we learn how the "Father of our Country" treated his mother's memory, and hopefully it reminds us that history has a tendency to wash away or galvanize a president's image, and that all of the presidents - every single one of them - had good points and bad points. This is great read in language simple enough for novices but informative enough even for those of us who've made presidential history a life's work.