When I first came to Washington in the early 1990s, I was eager to read a definitive book on Reagan and his presidency. I had grown up watching Reagan and broadly admired him, but I wanted to go into the weeds and get a handle on the tax bills, the MX missile controversy, Bitburg–all of it. So I asked for suggestions. The bottom line is that the book I wanted to read didn’t exist.

Since then, many people have written excellent books on Reagan: Cannon, D’Souza, Kengor, O’Sullivan, etc. Yet the very best–the one that takes the most comprehensive look at both foreign and domestic policy and smartly contextualizes all of it–is Steve Hayward’s two-volume work of political history, The Age of Reagan. The first volume covers Reagan’s pre-presidential years; the second volume, which came out this summer, covers the 1980s. This is the book I would have liked to read 15 years ago.

Steve gave a presentation on his book and Reagan last night to the Washington Fellows of the National Review Institute. If you read only one thing on Reagan, Hayward’s your guy.