Reading history is not one of my strengths, but this biography is tuned exactly to the things that do interest me about history: people and what it was like to be them.

I've been interested in Nixon for a long time—interested in the way you're interested in the giant objects Casey, IL boasts with its highway signs, interested in an "I should check that out sometime" way. I can't compare One Lost Soul to other Nixon bios because I've never read any others.

But I found this bio to be really compelling. Nixon's story is told with deceptively simple language—a simplicity that only comes when an author has absolutely metabolized their topic and knows exactly what they intend to say. Silliman writes with a rambling, easy tone that I think might imitate the cadence of Nixon's speech at least a little.

This book calls itself a religious biography, and that's fair; I might specify that it is a spiritual-psychological biography, interested at every major turn in Nixon's life in what it felt like to be in Nixons shoes, to hold Nixon's convictions and make his choices. Silliman's portrayal of Nixon makes Nixon's beliefs and behaviors plausible. You can see how he got to his ghastly conclusions from the nuances of his Quaker upbringing.

For example, in regard to the bombing campaigns he ordered in Cameroon and Vietnam:
<blockquote>The bombing paused for Christman, and Nixon, at his vacation home in Florida, noted in his diary that he was lonely. There were fewer and fewer people he could talk to. He didn't try to give a speech about the bombing, either. Who would understand?

The air raids resumed on the twenty-sixth, with 120 bombers taking to the skies again. They dropped bomb after bomb after bomb. With each one, Nixon believed he was bringing peace. Bombs were peace. War was peace. Light was darkness. God was the devil.</blockquote>

Other highlights for me were the extensively-documented discussions of Nixon's interactions with religious leaders like Billy Graham—what they expected of him, how he resisted them and clung to a (surprising!) core of authenticity when it came to his own faith, and how they supported him almost straight to the end anyway.

I had a great time with this book! Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I found this book to be very interesting, but I also had trouble with it. All the author was doing was castigating a man who is unable to defend himself. Hasn't Richard Nixon been beat up enough already? And all of the insecurities the author attributes to Nixon are things that everyone deals with at one time or another in their lives.