About this item
A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-DispatchBefore there was Reagan the conservative icon, there was Reagan the president: genial, unknowable, faced with doubters, scandals, and the final throes of the Cold War. In this extraordinary novel, Thomas Mallon takes us to the tense, high-stakes months in 1986 when - with the Iran-Contra affair, the AIDS epidemic, and the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev - Reagan and those around him were shaping history. We see Nancy Reagan - brooding, protective, consulting her astrologist at every turn. We see the young Christopher Hitchens - his incisive, acerbic voice lending a powerful counterpoint to events as they unfold.
About the Author
Thomas Mallon is a novelist, critic and director of the creative writing program at The George Washington University. He attended Brown University as an undergraduate and earned a Master of Arts and a Ph. D. from Harvard. He received the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1994 and won a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1987. Mallon taught English at Vassar College from 1979-1991. Mallon is the author of the novels , and most recently s; as well as writing four works of nonfiction. He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column for ten years, and has contributed frequently to, and . He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and became Director of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2004. He then served as Deputy Chairman of the NEH. He lives in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood in Washington, DC.
