41 Books Like Pat Nixon

While David offers some interesting and important insights about the real Pat – her humor, her grit, and her kindness, the overall picture of Pat as victim of her own life can make the book off-putting. The more I learned about Pat from my research, the less I trusted some of David’s more saccharine statements about her life. Taken with a grain of salt, however, the book offers some interesting stories I did not find elsewhere.  

Out of the myriad of books analyzing presidential marriages, this volume, in my opinion, does the best job of showing an in-depth view of the Nixons’ relationship. Troy acknowledges the stereotypes and caricatures of the couple, puts these misrepresentations in context, and then reveals a much more balanced view of the Nixon marriage. He never forgets that a marriage involves both partners!

Although the sections directly discussing Pat are limited, I found this book very useful. Holt offers a view of another presidential marriage that was contemporaneous and interactive with the Nixons. Mamie was a role model for Pat and Holt was one for me. Holt provided me with a roadmap for dealing with sensitive issues within a marriage and a presidency.

Lady Bird’s diary is worth reading no matter what you are studying. She is insightful, funny, and attentive to her unique perspective as First Lady. In terms of understanding Pat, the diary offers an outsider’s view from someone who understood Pat’s situation personally. The tidbits concerning their first post-election meeting and then subsequent visits provide evidence of Pat’s humor, humility, and kindness.

This collection of essays by pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem introduces the reader to the roots of modern-day feminism and the specific challenges Steinem and others faced to obtain what we consider today to be simple rights.

This book combines history, biography, and sociology, and Steinem captivated me with her clear and concise writing style, wit, and dry sense of humor. In addition to recounting her own experiences (such as her assignment as a reporter to pose as a Playboy bunny), she tells the stories of such varied subjects as First Lady Pat Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, author Alice Walker, and others.

I read this book shortly after it was published in 1983, and I read it again in 2020; both times I was shocked at the every-day indignities women faced routinely, and I was repeatedly encouraged by the bravery of Steneim and others to take on the mostly-male “establishment.”

Steinem reminds… show more.

Lyn Macdonald is my go-to historian for WW1, and I only pick out this volume – she has written one for each year of the war – because if you want a thorough, detailed account of the war you will want to start at the beginning. She is a fine writer, and very readable, and her books are full of extracts from letters and diaries of the men at the front, and their families back home, which give you the genuine, authentic flavour of how people thought and spoke at the time, and allows you to feel you were really there.

I love this book on many levels. Utopia is always just out of reach but with the scale of time, one could argue that we’re currently living in a utopia.

Even if we don’t have flying cars, more people have opportunities and access to resources than ever before in recorded history.

This book is for optimists and pessimists alike, as the author does a great job addressing the current issues we face and outlining a future worth building. A future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and no national borders, where opportunities are shared more equitably.

If everyone read this book I know we’d be one step closer to reaching utopia.

Billy Graham preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to some 215 million people in more than 185 countries. He once preached to a crowd estimated at 1.1 million people in Seoul, South Korea. What set him apart and contributed to his incredible gifts? 

In this engaging and comprehensive book, William Martin gives readers a better understanding of Graham’s strengths and weaknesses and the all-consuming nature of leading a powerful ministry for over fifty years.

From President Truman to President Trump, the evangelist offered spiritual counsel to these and other world notables. Martin describes the differing relationships Graham had with these leaders, sometimes tinged with regret, especially Graham’s fraught relationship with Richard Nixon. 

This is the story that made me want to be either a reporter or a whistleblower. The trail of this episode from the moments the break-in occurred at Watergate to the resignation of President Nixon show how complex corruption often is. “Getting to the bottom of it” is often never fully achieved in conspiracies, not only as large and sweeping as this one, but of countless others that are much smaller in scale.

Additionally, this is a great example of how the original decision to commit the first corrupt act leads to more and more of it until corruption defines the existence of men and women who started out with good intentions. 

This is an encyclopedia for anybody who wants to doublecheck the official version of events in US history starting from George Washington all the way through the presidencies of Nixon, the two Bushes, and Barak Obama. Investigative journalist Robert Parry worked for Associated Press and Newsweek on the Iran-Contra affair and spent years on the October Surprise, that cost President Jimmy Carter a second term. If you want to understand the role of the arms industry on US foreign policy since World War II, this is a great start. Or as President Eisenhower put it in his farewell address: “… we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”