Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
reflective
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
I have read a lot of presidential history but I still learned a lot about the eight men who became “accidental presidents.” The author did a great job painting informative portraits of all of them, but especially those not as well known. He also makes a persuasive argument for changing the way vice presidents are selected and informed once in the job.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
slow-paced
at some points, the author put in his opinion when it was unnecessary. and the writing style wasnt anything to write home about
I like this book. It is a brief look at the men that had became the President. I just finished reading a book on John Tyler - and he set the precedent for the Vice-President becoming the President, yet it took the until 1967 for the 25th Amendment - the succession of the President to become a law. I will continue reading about each President in order of election, but this is a good book for those wanting to learn more and about those that did not campaign to be POTUS.
4 stars for making me interested in the topic, not for execution. As others have pointed out, there were really sort of a lot of errors.
Full disclosure, I did not read this book, but listened to it and I thought the choice in reader was not the best one. But all that aside I enjoyed this book. I thought it was very week researched and thoughtfully planned. There seemed to be a bias toward the latter presidents because this was where Cohen really hit his stride, the chapters before Teddy Roosevelt being rather dry. A great insight on a often forgotten part of America’s history
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
This book provides a pretty good overview of each of the eight men who became president as the result of president dying in office while they were VP. Main takeaways are that presidents dying in office has happened a lot (about once every 15 years from 1841-1963, or almost 40% of elected presidents in that period) and that the US political system has never taken VP selection sufficiently seriously given this likelihood. The entire book feels like it's missing a more central argument to coordinate the different stories about vice presidents who by happenstance found themselves in the whitehouse. As it is, these different sections of the book largely stand on their own as small biographies of these men ended up in the vice presidency through the various political considerations of their day, with relatively short sections on their actual time in office (except for LBJ for whom this distribution is reversed)