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“What if you set off on a vacation
trip in search of history—and your destination was
the men who had been president?”
Asking himself that tantalizing question, bestselling author
and award-winning journalist Bob Greene embarked on a long
journey across the breadth of the nation, hoping to spend
time with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George
Bush and Ronald Reagan. The result of his odyssey is Fraternity.
Rich with the sounds of the presidents’ own voices,
Fraternity is dramatic, surprising, funny, revealing, inspiring,
tragic, touching and unforgettable: a story destined to be
read and enjoyed not just now, but far into the future as
Americans think about who we are as a people.
Here is Nixon, in an unmarked office high above Manhattan,
explaining the reason for his solitary walks through New
York streets at 5:30 every morning. Here is Carter, riding
in a Secret Service van, recalling the sting of his family’s
being mocked for their rural Southern heritage, even after
he had won the White House. Here is Ford, beside a golf course
fairway, laughing at his startled discovery that of all his
presidential papers, the one worth the most on the open market
was a letter from a woman who tried to kill him. Here is
Bush, on the road with his son, remembering his despair and
anger at encountering a swastika carved into the sand behind
an elegant resort on American soil. And here is Nancy Reagan,
in a Beverly Hills hotel, on the haunting first night she
must stand in for her husband after the announcement of his
illness.
A travelogue of the national spirit that chronicles a quest
stretching over fifteen years and starring the biggest names
in the modern American saga, this is living history of the
most human kind, and Bob Greene at his very best.
BOB GREENE is a New
York Times bestselling author and an
award-winning journalist whose books include Once Upon
a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen; Duty:
A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War; Hang
Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan; Be True
to Your School; the novel
All Summer Long; and, with his sister, D. G. Fulford, To
Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories
for Generations to Come. As a magazine writer, he has been
lead columnist for Life and Esquire; as a broadcast journalist
he has served as contributing correspondent for ABC News
Nightline. For thirty-one years he wrote a syndicated newspaper
column based in Chicago, first for the Sun-Times and later
for the Tribune.
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