It’s on my reading list. Let me know if it’s good, I’ve read good things about it.
I'm really enjoying it, it's certainly researched to a fare thee well and also certainly humanizes Nixon. For instance, I learned that he once slipped on ice while carrying his then infant daughter Tricia in his arms, and ended up breaking both arms in several places while managing to shield her from impact. As a result his tailors were forever after challenged dealing with the fact that one of Nixon's arms was shorter than the other once he was patched up.
Farrell is attentive to interesting differences in accounts Nixon himself gives of certain events versus what other documented or interviewed sources had to say. These sometimes do illuminate a Nixon who was trying to polish at least his own image of himself. In his memoir,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he apparently had himself present at his campaign offices during his first Senate run in California, when a young Congressman JFK dropped off a thousand dollar campaign contribution (from his dad Joe Kennedy Sr. no less, who had no use for Helen Gahagan Douglas). But several other sources said that Nixon wasn't there and that someone else on his staff had accepted the check from Kennedy. I can certainly see where it would have been tempting in retrospect for Nixon to be the one taking that check from that particular "errand boy"...
A news-to-me and somewhat poignant note (in the light of Nixon's later behavior with less insight into himself and little empathy for others) was his reaction to having won that Senate race, which was notorious for its vicious tactics. He remarked to a supporter that "it was a helluva shoddy way to win..." but then in perhaps more typically Nixonian fashion he hastened to brush that off and add that it wasn't like he didn't know that about politics anyway and so there was "no point bitching about it now."
I do have to say that in the ebook's current incarnation, the manner of indexing in quite off-putting. There are a few footnotes in line that are given at chapter ends, and those are done in the usual way for ebook formatting, in the sense you can click on the note number in the text and be taken to the note, and then in the notes click on the note number again to be returned to your place in the text.
However, and inexplicably, in the index at back of book, there are additional, very thorough and wonderful but only partially linked notes for certain phrases or quotes that are presented in groups by chapter. Each phrase shown there does have a link in the index section, but if you click on it, you're just taken to the page (or two-page view if that's your setup) where the phrase appears, but you have to find exactly where the phrase is for yourself, there's no corresponding link to get back to the index, and the indexed phrases are not underlined or otherwise annotated in any way in the text. In a word: Bummer!
I finally decided to read each chapter's index segment after finishing a chapter because the notes for the indexed phrases are generally well worth reading. But it's an annoying "solution" at best since I sometimes want to go back to the text when I read the annotations associated to a given phrase. After doing that then the only way to get back to the index reliably (as opposed to hoping the "Back" menu option will be current) is to use a temporary bookmark in the index for the group of phrases indexed for that particular chapter.
Also it seems to me that some of the rather few in-line footnotes, the ones having the notes presented at chapter end, are rather curious in terms of why they're even there, as opposed to just having been noted parenthetically or in a subsequent sentence in the text. On the other hand some of what's in-line text seems it could have been a footnote. All that to me seems like the province and handiwork of editors, possibly running into deadlines, but anyway not especially well done, at least in this edition.
Speaking of editing in general, the book could have done with a bit more.
Still for all that I can't put this book down sometimes so I'm clearly finding it very readable. I just hope they will update the thing later with better notes and some more usable index links.
