Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals, and Malarkey from George W. to George W - Hardcover

Holland, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579620817 ISBN 13: 9781579620813

Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co, 2003

Synopsis

Presents a collection of anecdotes and descriptions of the humorous behavior, eccentricities, and foibles of the American presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush.

About this title

From the Publisher:

We survived the peculiar election of ’00. Now we’re rolling up our sleeves for ’04. It’s the great American game.

Every four years we roll the dice. And every four years, the losers feel it’s the end of civilization as we know it. The winners feel that happy days are here again.

They’re both wrong.

Barbara Holland’s forthcoming book, Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals, and Malarkey from George W to George W (pub date January 21) shows us the hilarious trials we’ve survived. The decent presidents damned by undeserved circumstances. The bad ones blessed by undeserved good luck. Each in his own way memorable. Almost all, as Dave Barry comments on the cover, "just as weird as Richard Nixon."

Barry calls it "a wonderfully funny book," and it is. Few people will forget President Pierce, probably three sheets to the wind, arrested for running down an old lady on his horse. Or the lady reporter trapping John Quincy Adams at his morning skinny-dip in the Potomac. Or the charmless fellows -- scowling, uncombed, puny or hugely fat -- who managed to get elected before television came along.

It’s also a useful perspective. Read backward, starting from George W. Bush – to be updated before publication - we learn that the future probably isn’t as bad as we fear or as good as we hope.

We expect this book to command major attention in these anxious times. We’ve distributed over 800 of these advance galleys, to independent booksellers, the United States Senators, past presidents, columnists, reviewers, and the broadcast media. We expect this to be our top seller.

It’s just been listed as a Top Ten selection of the January/February Book Sense 76 List of the American Booksellers Association.

About the Author:

Barbara Holland was born in Washington DC during the Roosevelt administration, inhaling an early interest in presidential doings. Almost ever since, she has earned a meager living writing short fiction, magazine articles and columns for a dizzying variety of publications from "Country Journal" to "Smithsonian," and over a dozen books.

She has a short attention span, so her topics range widely, from "Endangered Pleasures-In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity and Other Indulgences" (Little Brown 1995) to "They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades" (Pantheon 2001).

She wrote "Hail to the Chiefs" because American history bored her in high school and she wanted to do a version that left out the boring parts, which she contends nobody remembers anyway.

She lives on top of a mountain in northern Virginia that offers, on very clear days, a long long view of the nation's capital and the doings thereof.

About this edition

• Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1579620817
• ISBN 13: 9781579620813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272