MAX BOOT is a historian, author, and foreign policy analyst. His biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by The New York Times and made best-of-the-year lists from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Economist. Boot’s previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He is the author of four other books, including The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with his family in New York City.

WHY THEY’RE JOINING US

The timing of Max Boot’s terrific new biography of Ronald Reagan could not be better. The widely-lauded book, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2024 by The New York Times, offers a gripping portrait of the affable if often opaque 40th President of the United States while illuminating the ideologic currents that brought us to today. You come away from Reagan: His Life and Legend with a deep understanding of the emotional pull of nostalgia on the American psyche and a deep admiration for the narrative gifts of a superb and fair-minded biographer.

Photo credit – Cynthia Van Elk