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jwillis81 's review for:
Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies
by Mary Lynn Kotz, J. B. West
This book appealed to me for two reasons. The first is that I'm keenly interested in the White House and the presidency in general; the second is that I enjoy biographies on former presidents and their first families. Based on the blurb of the book, I was really hoping that there would be a lot of the former, and a little of the latter. Unfortunately, it ended up being the inverse, with much more information about the first ladies and the first families, with only tangential information about the operations of the White House or the interactions with the Office of the President.
More disappointingly, in what appears to be an effort to still be discreet after all these years, very little of the information and insights offered about the first ladies and their families would be considered unique or unexpected. Most of the anecdotes are either extremely trivial in nature, or already the subject of discussion from any number of biographical pieces on the first ladies.
The book was well-written and well-presented, and you can tell that the author has a true reverence for and pride in the position he held for decades. There were small nuggets of interesting information scattered throughout the book, but overall it felt like it was striving extra hard to be as demure and inoffensive as possible when part of the appeal of the whole book, at least for me, was the potential promise of some interesting and unusual tidbits gleaned from overseeing the White House during the course of several different administrations.
It was an interesting read, but I was hoping for a little more.
More disappointingly, in what appears to be an effort to still be discreet after all these years, very little of the information and insights offered about the first ladies and their families would be considered unique or unexpected. Most of the anecdotes are either extremely trivial in nature, or already the subject of discussion from any number of biographical pieces on the first ladies.
The book was well-written and well-presented, and you can tell that the author has a true reverence for and pride in the position he held for decades. There were small nuggets of interesting information scattered throughout the book, but overall it felt like it was striving extra hard to be as demure and inoffensive as possible when part of the appeal of the whole book, at least for me, was the potential promise of some interesting and unusual tidbits gleaned from overseeing the White House during the course of several different administrations.
It was an interesting read, but I was hoping for a little more.