A full life Reflections at ninety

Review by Booklist Review

Having written several books already on his religious beliefs, his years in the White House, his childhood Carter looks back on 90 years of life and offers lessons learned as well as information not covered in his previous works. New material includes his time in the navy, his years as a farmer involved in community projects, the backstories to his gubernatorial and presidential runs, an intimate look at his marriage as it has grown in equal partnership, and his relationships with other presidents. He offers commentary on racial changes in the nation, from his early days playing with boys from African American families who lived nearby to witnessing the slow integration of blacks in the U.S. military to dealing with the harsh racial climate of Georgia that objected to any efforts at integration and with challenges to Carter's more progressive impulses that figured in his bids for local offices. Interspersed among the essays are poems, drawings, and photographs that enhance the feeling of intimacy as Carter reveals private thoughts and recollections over a fascinating career as businessman, politician, evangelist, and humanitarian.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

While there's no gainsaying Carter's active and selfless post-White House life, this uneven volume is largely a superficial treatment of events and personalities covered elsewhere in more depth, including by the former president himself. Readers unfamiliar with his almost 30 other books may find something new, but even they are likely to be frustrated by passing references to major life events. How did a young Carter feel when his close friend in the Navy killed himself after a hazing? What led him to fall in love instantly with his future wife, Rosalynn? Why was a weekend with a dying Hubert Humphrey among the most "interesting" of his life? Carter doesn't say. He also seems to credit the successful passage of the 1978 Camp David Accords, perhaps his most significant presidential achievement, to his fortuitous decision to make a thoughtful gesture to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's grandchildren. Carter's rise from poverty to the most powerful office in the world is inspiring, but this book, complete with average-at-best poetry and artwork, reads more like a vanity project than a lasting source of inspiration and information. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

On the occasion of Carter's 90th birthday, the 39th U.S. president and Nobel laureate (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power) delivers a memoir that reads like two separate books. The first five chapters provide insights into Carter's upbringing and the events that shaped his life until he and his family arrived at the White House in 1977. Especially fascinating is the author's account of his service in the navy and the difficulties that his family faced, including living in a housing project in the mid-1950s. Chapter six offers vignettes on political issues during his presidency. While one would expect Carter's musings on topics such as the Iranian hostage crisis, his commentary on events such as the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the return of a crown to Hungary seem extraneous. The last chapter focuses on Carter's thoughts about current issues. Even though some are germane, others, such as his paragraph on a clairvoyant who aided him in finding missing documents, make it somewhat difficult to take him seriously. VERDICT Appropriate for lay readers interested in Carter's place in the history of the presidency.-John R. Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Notes at 90 from a former president at peace. There is little in the way of score settling in the latest from Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, 2014, etc.) and not much that is likely to ignite controversy the way that Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006) did. With his long-standing marriage, the Carter Center, and a Nobel Peace Prize, along with more than two-dozen books that have "provided a much-needed source of income for my family," the author has enjoyed one of the longest and richest lives since leaving the presidency. He has also established himself as a respected and activist public figure, and he still can't figure out why the press treated him so negatively during his one term in Washington. "I had negative coverage in forty-six of the forty-eight months I served.This was a problem we could never understand or resolve but just decided to accommodate what we couldn't correct," he writes. The presidency and the campaign for re-election receive short shrift here, perhaps as Carter has written about them at length before. Instead, he writes, "some of the more personal and intimate events in my life are covered here for the first time," including his military years, a career in which he might have remained (and which wife Rosalynn resented him for leaving) if the death of his father hadn't returned him to the family farm. Carter pays only cursory attention to his political ascent as a perennial outsider who became state senator, governor, and, in the wake of Watergate, president. Only an offhand remark on a Gallup poll of 32 "names of potential Democratic nominees. Mine was not among them," suggests the surprise and significance of his triumph. The drawings and poems by the author add even more of a personal touch, though crises in his marriage and his "estrangement" from the Obama presidency offer the most noteworthy revelations. A memoir that reads like an epilogue to a life of accomplishment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

A Full Life CHAPTER ONE Archery and the Race Issue My Family My life has been shaped inevitably by the experiences and decisions of my forefathers, and I have learned a lot about my family history. My mother was Bessie Lillian Gordy, and I knew all her intimate relatives and many of her distant cousins. We would sometimes drive after church services to Richland, her hometown, to have dinner with her close-knit family, where the table conversation often led to an explosion of emotions and angry departures. My father was James Earl Carter, and I never knew even his close cousins who lived in the county seat just nine miles from our home in Plains. It seemed that the Carters were not interested in each other. During my first year as president, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the White House and presented me with a genealogical study of my Carter family. The information went back thirteen generations, to the early 1600s, and included birth, death, and marriage records, land deeds, and data from some of the early courthouse proceedings that involved legal disputes. I put it all in a big box and sent it to our home in Plains. After leaving the White House I bought my first computer and entered the Mormon research data when I was sent the first edition of a software program called Family Tree Maker. My wife Rosalynn's family always had three reunions each year (there would have been four if two Smiths hadn't married each other), so in 1998 I decided to have a reunion of the direct descendants of my great-great-grandfather Wiley Carter, on what would have been his two hundredth birthday. More than 950 people came, and I corrected mistakes in my family records and brought them up to date. More recently, I gave the data to our son Jeffrey, and he has published a much more definitive study, Ancestors of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, focusing on our time in America. These were rough pioneer days as immigrants struggled for existence or preeminence, and even our more recent family history was, to a surprising degree, shaped by violence. Wiley Carter (1798-1864) was deputized in a sheriff's posse in Wilkes County when he shot and killed a man named Usry. There was a routine one-day trial, and the sheriff testified, "Usry was evidently preparing to shoot Carter. The two men were cursing each other and both raised their guns about the same time and fired. Usry was killed." Wiley was found not guilty of murder because the victim was armed and threatening. However, it was known that there had been a long history of ill will between the two men, and after the trial a lot of resentment was stirred up in the community by Usry's family and friends. After Wiley's wife, Ann, delivered her eleventh child and died, Wiley remarried and moved to a farm about ten miles north of where the town of Plains is located. He had traded for the land with an original owner, who won it in a lottery that was held in 1833, after Indians had been forced to leave West Georgia in the late 1820s. Wiley's second wife had another son, who moved to Texas. Wiley's fourth son, Littleberry Walker Carter (1829-1873), was my great-grandfather. He served with two of his brothers as artillerymen in the Confederate army. They fought in twenty-one battles and finally left the service in Florida, a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He then bought and operated a farm just west of Americus that later became Souther Field (now Jimmy Carter Regional Airport), where Charles Lindbergh made his first solo flight. He was killed "in an argument over the proceeds of a flying jenny [merry-go-round]" in 1873, as recorded in the county newspaper. Known as Billy, his son and my grandfather William Archibald Carter (1858-1903) moved in 1888 about fifty miles south to a rural community known as Rowena, where he was a farmer, operated two sawmills and a winery, and owned a cotton gin. He was small but tough. One time when he was harvesting sugarcane, his machete was deflected into his thigh, inflicting a deep gash. Billy used his belt to stop the flow of blood, sent to the house for a needle and thread, sewed up the wound, and resumed work. He was shot and killed in a fight with a man named Will Taliaferro, in an altercation over a desk stolen by Taliaferro from Billy's cotton gin. After his property was sold, Billy's family moved back to Plains and purchased a farm in nearby Webster County in 1904, which my father, Earl Carter, became responsible for operating as a teenager. I can only imagine the multiple skills needed to perform all the duties of my ancestors, and it may be that my inclination to pursue new ideas and to design and create things in my woodshop is inherited from them. My mother, Lillian Gordy, left her job as a postal clerk in Richland and moved eighteen miles to Plains (population about five hundred) in 1920 to become a registered nurse. She married Earl when she finished her training, in 1923. I was born in October 1924, and our family lived in a house on South Bond Street with Edgar and Allie Smith as next-door neighbors. Edgar was the only automobile mechanic in the community, and directly across the street from his shop my father owned and operated a small general store after completing military service as a first lieutenant in World War I. The Smiths' daughter Rosalynn was born in August 1927, and my mother later told me that I was taken to the house next door and peeked into the cradle to see the newest baby on the street. Our families were very close, and Rosalynn's younger sister was named for Mama, who nursed Rosalynn's father during his terminal illness with leukemia. Daddy became a full-time farmer in 1928, when I was four years old. I was raised on a farm he bought about two and a half miles west of Plains in the rural community known as Archery. Archery My boyhood home in Archery was a Sears, Roebuck house that had been built six years before our family occupied it. At that time the Sears catalogue offered homes of several sizes, with three basic options: (1) all the components of a complete house and the tools needed to construct it, loaded into a single railroad boxcar with plans and instructions; (2) everything needed for a house except the lumber; and (3) just the plans and instructions, practically free but requiring doors, windows, hardware, and other parts that were sold by Sears. We learned later that our home was one of the second options, since genetic testing showed that its wooden frame and siding had come from trees harvested on the farm. Excerpted from A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety by Jimmy Carter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---