Review of Jonathan Alter. His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life; Kai Bird. The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter; Stuart E. Eizenstat. President Carter: The White House Years; Rick Perlstein. Reaganland: America's Right Turn.

The Trilateral Commission provided many of the individuals who would guide foreign policy in the Carter administration, but there is an opening for a more sustained history of the connection between the intellectual evolutions of the period and the Carter administration. Finally, Kai Bird's I The Outlier i and Jonathan Alter's I His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life i hope to rescue Carter's achievements and humble character from the doldrums of history. Carter grew up in a farming community in Plains, Georgia, so small that he has known his wife, Rosalynn, since her birth: "Jimmy's mother, a nurse, delivered Rosalynn, then brought her nearly three year old son over to see the new baby" (Alter, xi). Even Republican operative Roger Stone paid tribute to Carter, saying: "Jimmy Carter was not a great President but he is a good man, a patriotic American and an honest Christian ... May God bless him.". [Extracted from the article]