A review by bhswanson
Dinner with the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House by Alex Prud'homme

Did not finish book. Stopped at 20%.

There is good raw material here and Prud’homme writes well, but there are too many instances where he simply gets the facts wrong or where he oversells the importance of his topic.  

The accuracy issue is, for me, a deadly flaw: maybe I just happened to notice the only two or three places in the entire book where the author fumbled the historical record, but…if I know he’s made some (easy) mistakes, my trust in all his other “facts” is diminished. 

Some examples:

• (p. 80) “On the battlefield, he proved such a ruthless tactician that Useless Grant became “Unconditional Surrender Grant”. After he defeated the vaunted Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, the war was effectively over. Phoenixlike, the once-cashiered soldier was named the Union army’s commanding general.” All these sentences are accurate. They are, however, in the wrong order, and this matters. 
• (p. 93) “Nellie Grant’s [wedding] was only the sixth time that such nuptials had been celebrated since 1820, when Dolley Madison’s sister Maria Hester Monroe was betrothed there.” Baffling. Maria Hester Monroe was then-President Monroe’s daughter and not related in any way to Dolley Madison. 

As for the overselling (e.g. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the reputation of President Washington, his family, and the United States itself, rested in Hercules’s hands”), I do understand how an author can develop a bit of myopia after focusing on a particular topic for so long. But in this instance, when the chosen topic has obvious potential, this sort of puffery is both off-putting and unnecessary.