His Very Best

Jimmy Carter, a Life

By: Jonathan Alter

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

From one of America’s most respected journalists and modern historians comes the highly acclaimed, “splendid” (The Washington Post) biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian.

Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people.

Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first.

“One of the best in a celebrated genre of presidential biography,” (The Washington Post), His Very Best traces how Carter evolved from a timid, bookish child—raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand—into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties.

This “important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution” (The New York Times Book Review) will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

Critic reviews

“In this definitive biography, Jonathan Alter provides a wonderfully readable assessment of the character and achievements of our most underrated modern president. It is a deeply personal account, filled with fascinating new information. Carter's story is a needed inspiration in this dark time.”
—Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

“This deeply researched and fluidly written biography is the first truly comprehensive look at our 39th president. Alter illuminates Carter’s character, and explains much about the strengths and weaknesses of the elusive man from Plains. This is a fascinating work.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

“In this extraordinarily well-researched and well-written book, Jonathan Alter perfectly captures how Jimmy Carter was the most misunderstood president since Thomas Jefferson, and the only other not to lose a single American soldier in war. It's a compelling story of a complicated and brilliant life.”
—Andrew Young, former US Ambassador to the UN, Mayor of Atlanta, and close confidant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Jonathan Alter has painted an important and revealing portrait of Jimmy Carter, an American president who led many different lives. Alter’s memorable book goes a long way toward illuminating the shadows that have long obscured him.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America

Very enlightening

I am inspired to do more during my retirement. l spent my career in service to others. This book encouraged me not to give up. But, seek new ways to help and uplift others.

Jimmy Carter and climate change it could’ve occurred but didn’t because he was not reelected

Great book. I had never understood what a good man and wonderful president Jimmy Carter really was. What he accomplished for peace in the world, climate change, and the environment made him one of our better presidents. Had he been reelected I believe we would’ve had real action come on in I’m climate change a lot earlier

Fair, honest, thorough

Well written, objective, a pleasure to listen too. I throughly enjoyed the detail and narration

Excellent.

It's well past time that we should re-examine Jimmy Carter, and this book did a wonderful job. It peeled back the curtain not only on what the Carters presidency actually was, but also all of the factors that worked together to convince everybody that it was something else. I knew some good things about Carter going into this book, but (unlike almost any other politician), the more I actually learned about him, the more respect I gained. Now I am very much a Jimmy Carter fan.

(In all seriousness though, this book helps to illuminate a widely misunderstood period, and I would highly recommend reading it, even if you don't particularly like Carter).

Comprehensive and Compelling

I appreciated the depth, detail, and context of this biography of President Carter. I lived through his presidency and was aware he had been operating behind the scenes for the rest of his life, but I was missing the zoom in and zoom out that this provided.

I highly recommend this for anyone who wants to learn more about Carter’s remarkable character and life.