Rating: 
Summary: What a waste!
Review: Edmund Morris has squandered a huge opportunity. He gets great access to his subject, has plenty of time to write, and this is what he turns out.How can a biography of Reagan spend one and a half pages on the 1980 presidential campaign? As a book it is bad, and as a biography it is even worse. Fans of Reagan should wait.
Rating: 
Summary: Long on Promises, Short on Delivery
Review: The author (Edmund Morris) and the publisher (Random House) promised us a new biographical format. Indeed, the prospect of virtually a new genre was the message permeating the whirlwind pre-release publicity tour. As undoubtedly thousands of others did, this reader rushed to get a copy of what was expected to be a significant, in-depth work about Ronald Reagan, his character, and his accomplishments. Unfortunately, Morris' effort simply does not deliver on its promises. The book turns out to be neither significant nor indepth. Rather, we find nearly 700 pages of meandering text which, at least in the first quarter of the book, features as much biographical information about the author himself as it does about the author's subject, Ronald Reagan. This reader has the impression that the author was struggling for focus, and never really grasped his subject. Another troubling, and related, aspect of this book concerns its disappointing lack of depth. In his many media appearances prior to publication, Morris stressed how challenging it had been for him to really get to know Ronald Reagan. It is evident the author never overcame the problem. And that is a shame, because we had just one opportunity to experience the special insights about Reagan that could come only from a biographer who was given unprecedented access over a period of several years to Reagan while he was in office. One only wishes Morris could dig through his notes, find focus, and try again.
Rating:
Summary: Unreadable! Edmund Morris couldn't handle the Truth!
Review: Reagan's entire 1980 election campaign covered in about one page. His 1984 re-election covered in about one paragraph. The author is upset because Reagan didn't recite some poetry instead of ordering Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!" heard enough? The author appears to be a liberal, elitist, intelluctual snob who couldn't accept the truth. The truth being that this honest,simple, modestly intellegent man became the greatest president of the 20th century. The author is constatly attempting to attach deep complicted meanings to President Reagan, but is unable to. Thus resorts to his fictional accounts and the injection of his "intellectually superior" self into this piece of garbage called a memior. Note that most favorable reviews are from Reagan haters. Love him or hate him this book is garbage.
Rating:
Summary: The sinning city of capitol or the shinning city on the hill
Review: The media is suffering from foot in mouth disease again by saying that Edmund Morris's new book presented Ronald Reagan as an airhead. They took that word and "ran" with it. Now, Morris is getting tons of free publicity with their apologies. Morris said that his first impression was that Reagan was an apparent airhead but the rest of his book is devoted to the high respect he had for Reagan. There are some spots in the book which give a questionable impression of the author who inserts himself into the story. I wonder how many times they will rehash this one. The customer reviews aren't looking so good. I wonder how many people actually read the 800+ pages. One reviewer said he prefers factual papers such as the National Inquierer, etc. Factual!!!! He has to be kidding!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Its a memoire, not a biography... just bad writing!
Review: It's a shame that Edmund Morris squandered such an unprecedented opportunity. DUTCH is a disservice to Regan and the country. In the end, it's just self indulgent junk writing.
Rating:
Summary: Fine writing, fiction confusing, no insight about events
Review: Morris knows how to create vivid, even poetic pictures, but he displays astonishingly little interest in the reasons why great events developed as they did. How, if Reagan was the empty suit that Morris portrays, could he have helped eliminate high inflation as a national issue? How could Reagan have helped usher in a low inflation boom which, except for a nine month interruption by tax hiker George Bush in 1990, continues to this day? How could Reagan have identified critical weaknesses in the Soviet Union, missed by such allegedly deep thinkers as John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Lester Thurow and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.? How could Reagan have pursued a strategy which seized the moral high ground from the Soviet Union, undermined principal Soviet sources of export revenue (oil and weapons), stopped Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and elsewhere and driven Gorbachev back to the bargaining table for an historic arms reduction (not arms control) agreement? Why is a missile defense system, trashed by Clinton, now being revived? Morris offers little insight about any of these obviously important issues because he focused on his word pictures and his distracting fictional techniques. Incredibly, Morris spends more time writing about his fictional life, his fictional son and his fictional friends than he does on important issues. It's true what everybody says, a reader has a hard time telling what's fact and what's fiction here, and the temptation is strong to say the hell with it, this is just an elegantly written historical novel. Who would dare cite it as a reliable factual source? The Dinesh D'Souza book, Ronald Reagan (1997), is far more revealing about important issues.
Rating: 
Summary: Morris Misses His Subject
Review: I expected much more from this book, went into it willing to embrace the author's experiments with literary technique in exchange for some deeper understanding of the phenomenon that was Reagan, I don't believe this book delivered, indeed got the impression that the author, buffaloed by his subject, fell back on pyrotechnics because that was all he had left. A brave biography of Reagan, now that I think of it, might have attempted to fictionalize his life and thoughts in the first person, if one is going to make up a character why not go all the way, and while the result wouldn't exactly be history it would have brought the author closer to the heart of his mystery and been, besides, a much more honest undertaking. The standard presidential biography tries to place the man and his actions in the context of his times. There's no question, love him or hate him, that the personality and policies of Ronald Reagan dominated the 1980s in just about every way. A less conventional biography might junk context and try to take the measure of the man, recreate the world view which made him different from other people. This biography fails at both. While not painful it reads more like the surrender of an author who couldn't get close enough to unravel the mystery of his subject or far enough away to set the man in the context of his times. How ironic, given the author's unrivaled access and sheer amount of time which he must have devoted to this project, that the he misses a man who was underestimated throughout his career by those whom, according to conventional wisdom, should have known better.
Rating:
Summary: Save your money and your time. Not a book worth reading
Review: Morris brings disdain, arrogance and cynicism to everthing he writes about, whether it is American culture, Christianity and the church, life in the mid west, or the person he is writing about. I finished 100 pages and decided to stop reading. His insertion of himself as the main character is arrogant, distracting and downright annoying. He constantly corrects Ronalds memories of his own life (while ironically maintaining that Raegan has a near photographic memory). I bought the book with eager anticipation and am very disappointed. Nancy Reagan is right - he wasted a unique opportunity to do an adequate job of a biography. He failed miserably at that task.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed- More about Morris than Reagan
Review: Best advice I received on this book was read the prologue and then skip to chapter 28. The first 400 pages are spent by Morris writing about his own fantasy childhood. The chapters on Reagan's precidency are interesting but lack insight into his decision making process.
Rating:
Summary: A monumental waste...
Review: Although I applaud Mr. Norton's creativity and ingenuity in employing a remarkable new literary device, I found this book to be confusing and very tough to determine what is indeed fact. Those who buy this book are interested in Ronald Reagan, and I found the author's self examination and own family history to be inappropriate. Mr. Norris had unprecedented access to a President who Alzheimer's has now taken. There is only one way to characterize what he did with that time and information... a waste.
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