His very best: Jimmy Carter, a life
(Book)

From one of America's most respected journalists and modern historians comes the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the 39th 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 promised never to lie to the American people--and for the most part never did. 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 19th; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the 20th; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health put him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the 21st. Drawing on fresh archival material and five years of extensive access to Carter and his entire family, Alter traces how he evolved from a timid, bookish child--raised mostly by a black woman--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 ducking the white terrorism around him helped power his later humanitarian commitments; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign 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. After leaving office, Carter continued eradicating diseases, building houses for the poor, and teaching Sunday School into his mid-90s. This engrossing, monumental biography will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

An intimate portrait of the thirty-ninth president draws on fresh archival material to trace Jimmy Carter's improbable rise from a humble peanut farmer and complex man of faith to an American president and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian.