President Reagan, who is said to have insisted that no document placed before him for his decision should exceed a single side of A4 paper, might have been amused to find himself the subject of a bibliography of no less than 4,250 items. It comprises books and articles (both academic and popular), chapters in collective works, pamphlets, theses, and government publications, dating between 1961 (before he had embarked on a political career) and 2005. The editor has been so thorough that his references range from a book on The Whales and Dolphins of American Waters (including an official statement by the President) to an article in Perceptual and Motor Skills (describing how students saw him). There are occasional annotations, particularly to supply lists of contents in collective works.
The various chapters cover the President's autobiographical writings and interviews, including assessments of the rhetorical style of “The Great Communicator”; biographies of him and his family; special periods of his career; works on members of his administration; his personal life; satires, cartoons, fiction, and poetry about him; and finally a section on his legacy, including many general assessments of him, some of which to a degree overlap with the contents of earlier chapters. Not surprisingly, the chapter devoted to his presidency fills about half the book, and in turn, about half of it covers domestic political issues and the other half foreign and defence policy; it is subdivided into sections on particular issues, or relations with particular countries. The index provides complete lists of authors and titles, but subjects appear to be covered only in a general manner, with references to pages, not to items.
A bibliography is usually very dry, but this one affords some light relief in the satirical section, which offers titles like The Fascist Gun in the West, The Ronald Reagan Coloring Book, and even one which the editor has felt obliged to censor on account of its indecency. The title number of Down with Ronald Reagan, Chieftain of Capitalist Reaction, and other Songs of Revolutionary Struggle and Socialism, sounds as if it must have been difficult for the members of the Marxist‐Leninist Party of the USA to sing.
In spite of its wide coverage, the bibliography does appear to have some limitations. The editor points out that it is strictly a bibliography, not a filmography, and it seems to include no contemporary criticisms of Reagan's films, though it does list a bibliography of his film career. Very little journalism seems to be included, unless the articles were later consolidated into a book. Nearly every item is in English, apart from a few published in a dual‐language text. Above all, 99 per cent of the items listed appear to have been published in the USA; even the section on US‐British relations includes only three items published solely in Britain. One suspects that the work must have been compiled from US databases only. These restrictions should be borne in mind by prospective purchasers of this otherwise comprehensive guide to the literature on one of the most influential of America's recent presidents.
