rain of errror

Reagan: His Life and Legend, Max Boot. (Liveright, 2024)

I found this large book in the library, picked it up and browsed the section on how Reagan won the 1966 California gubernatorial primary, a rather curious story. Boot gets the full tale right, so I checked the book out. Highly readable, discusses all of Reagan's career including both the artistic and economic sides of his movie-tv period. Does not stint on pointing out his habit of telling untrue stories as if they were true, his insistence that he wasn't racist while craftily making racist appeals, his strange evolution from a New Deal Democrat to a Barry Goldwater Republican, his presentation as a personable and friendly man while being completely alienated from all his children. Also explores why, then, he was so damned popular, partly that personable presentation and his quick-wittedness and (selectively) sharp memory, partly because his rather rigid acting background made him so good at speech-making but also because he was so good at writing his own speeches, something you don't expect of either an actor or a politician. Boot likes to end chapters with cliffhangers, which read oddly if you already know what's going to happen, like the chapter introducing his presidential administration which concludes, "And yet his presidential performance almost ended just sixty-nine days after it had begun."

And yet despite the sure command of detail, I found a few clanging factual errors. One of them appears twice:

1) After his wedding to Nancy and a reception in Toluca Lake, "Then the newlyweds drove sixty miles west in Ron's Cadillac convertible to Riverside, California, to spend their wedding night at the historic, Spanish-style Mission Inn." (p. 193)

2) His ranch ownership: "Reagan used part of the proceeds from the sale of Yearling Row to buy 778 acres in Riverside County, west of Los Angeles, for $347,000." (p. 285-6)

No, Max: Riverside is east of Los Angeles, not west. Drive 60 miles west from Toluca Lake and you'll be somewhere around Ventura.

In other erroneous news, I've discovered that there's a vast horde of people who've posted podcast videos on YouTube explaining things about Tolkien. If these were written down, I could glance over them quickly, but I'm not going to listen to them, especially as the only point of my doing so would be to see what they got right and what they got wrong. I did begin one which started with an outline of Tolkien's literary career, but stopped dead early on when the podcaster described The Hobbit as featuring "a large-footed creature called Bilbo Baggins." Oh, dear. Tolkien's hobbits are not "large-footed." They have hairy feet with leathery soles. Read the book, that's what it says. It's only in the movie that the necessity for prosthetic feet on the actors make their feet larger than normal. Don't describe the movies when you claim to be talking about the books.