Max Boot’s long-awaited “Reagan: His Life and Legend” was released two weeks ago. Boot is an author, historian and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His 2018 “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

For a modern president who loomed so large in his time, relatively few compelling, comprehensive biographies of Ronald Reagan have been written. Boot, a Russian-born naturalized American and self-identified conservative, has long been fascinated by Reagan and his presidency.

In 2013 he began a quest to assess Reagan’s life and legacy, tapping nearly every possible source of information including previous biographers’ personal notes, interviewing nearly 100 people from Reagan’s orbit and reviewing recently declassified documents. What resulted is a thoughtful, reflective and surprisingly critical tome.

Organized chronologically, “Reagan: His Life and Legend” successfully covers every important aspect of Reagan’s personal and professional lives. The author’s writing style is consistently easy to follow, but it does tend to oscillate between an elegant, lucid prose and the critical, no-nonsense syntax one might expect from a skilled lawyer.

Rather than fully de-coding the enigmatic Reagan – a challenge that has eluded even the best of his biographers – Boots settles on two seemingly unremarkable tenets: that on a personal level Reagan was inscrutable due to the circumstances of his upbringing and, in the political arena, his actions could be explained by his strong tendency towards pragmatism.

But if this “revelation” underwhelms most readers, the book does contain numerous redeeming elements. The Prologue and Introduction are each quite engaging, Boot does a very nice job reviewing the American Midwest during Reagan’s childhood, and a chapter devoted to Reagan’s summit with Gorbachev in Geneva will intrigue and entertain almost any reader.

In addition, Boot’s willingness to directly confront the countless contradictions posed by Reagan is both refreshing and valuable. Finally, the narrative is unusually dexterous in analyzing and explaining many of the foreign policy issues that confronted the Reagan administration.

But for all its merit this biography possesses its share of shortcomings. The publisher promises nothing less than a “definitive biography” which is “as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.” Against such a towering standard this biography certainly falls short.

Boots identifies early signs of “Trumpism” during the build-up of Reagan’s political career; his first mention of this appears just a few pages into the biography. Unfortunately, observance of the Trump phenomenon infiltrates the narrative in a way that evolves from somewhat intriguing…to oddly intrusive. This is, after all, a biography of the 40th president, not the 45th.

And while Boot’s objectivity is invaluable, he sometimes spends more time fact-checking Reagan than he devotes to creating the context and color of his subject’s time and place. A president’s supporting cast of advisors and surrogates provides the biographer with a rich opportunity to weave layers of interpersonal texture into a narrative. Boot fails to take full advantage of the possibility.

Finally, although an eloquent summary is provided in the books opening pages, this biography lacks the methodical, meticulous conclusory review of Reagan’s legacy which a definitive biography so richly deserves and which Boot, after more than a decade of consideration, is uniquely able to offer.

Overall, Max Boot’s “Reagan: His Life and Legend” is a welcome addition to the body of work devoted to the life and legacy of Ronald Reagan. This biography adds a unique voice to Reagan’s biographical library and offers much to the curious reader. But someone seeking a uniquely-compelling presidential biography, or even just the definitive biography of Reagan, will find it doesn’t live up to that promise.

Overall Rating: 4 stars