Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician—America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography.

From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained an enigma—a man of profound contradictions—even to those closest to him. Believing that this inscrutability contributed to Reagan’s appeal, Max Boot sought to reveal the real man behind the mythology. Drawing on more than a hundred new interviews and thousands of newly available documents, Reagan tells the epic story of the Depression-era poor boy who transfixed and transformed the nation. Yet Boot, a one-time Republican policy advisor, offers no apologia, depicting a man with a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing.

Providing revelatory insights into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.