Book Review - Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
There comes a time in every person’s life when they must ask themselves the difficult question, “Who was the President of the United States between the years 1981 and 1989?” The answer, of course, is Ronald Reagan, whom you may remember from such classic films as “Santa Fe Trail” and “Tugboat Annie Sails Again”. Today, for your reading pleasure, I’m going to review Edmund Morris’s* Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.
* Note: Edmund Morris is not related to Desmond Morris, the author of such books as The Human Zoo, which I’m guessing, based on the title, is a more detailed study of the Reagan administration.
I haven’t read the book, and I don’t really know anything about Ronald Reagan. All I know is, the Liquidation store in a nearby town has had hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the book on sale for $0.25 each for at least two years. Most businesses would have recycled them or used them as firewood by that point, but Liquidation World was bold enough to keep the books in stock, and gain the respect of the community (on an unrelated topic, I’m pretty sure Liquidation World has been out of business for several months. I haven’t checked).
Although I haven’t read the book, I must say, it’s changed my life. Let no one say this isn’t a book with a solid foundation: it is a heavy-handed literary endeavour, with more depth than you might expect.
It’s a useful book, whether you need to keep a door open...
...elevate your coffee maker so you can pour coffee...
...protect your expensive cutting boards from being damaged...
...and even keep incriminating documents from flying away before you destroy them!
In conclusion, you don’t need to read Dutch to appreciate it as a work of literary, or at least engineering, genius. I proudly give Dutch 8.5 Reagans out of 10.
I bought "Dutch" for $8 in a used bookstore in downtown Naperville. I started reading and encountered the long passages about the author's family. That seemed really strange in a biography, so I looked at the reviews in amazon.com. The reviewers hit the mark with Edmund Morris's book. It's an example of extreme egotism and maliciousness. I rarely throw books away, but "Dutch" went right into the can with the rest of the garbage. A while back, Edmund Morris introduced a concert at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He cracked a little inane joke about Bush to the audience. Morris is a huckster and lacks any credibility.
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