Pick the President by the Problem You're Facing

Quick answer: Short on time, read Joseph Ellis's His Excellency on Washington. Willing to give it a month, read David McCullough's Truman. Better still, pick by the problem you're facing. Each book below earns its pages in a few specific scenes.

In March 1783, George Washington walked into a hall in Newburgh, New York, to face army officers who hadn't been paid and were talking about pressuring Congress with force. He could have taken them up on it. Nobody would have stopped him.

He started reading a letter and stumbled. He took out a pair of glasses most of the men had never seen him wear and said he'd gone gray and nearly blind in their service. By most accounts, some of them wept. The plot was over.

That scene is the argument for presidential biography. A business book hands you the principle, something like "lead by example," with the scene scrubbed off. A good biography hands you the room, the men in it and what it cost. Here are six, matched to the trouble you might be in.

When people want you to take more power than you should

Washington. Pick His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis if you want it under 300 pages. Pick Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life if you want the full portrait, at over 800 pages. Both cover Newburgh. Both cover his resignation of his commission at the end of the war, and his decision to leave after two terms.

Opinion, labeled: the most American thing Washington ever did was give power back. A free country depends on men who could keep it and don't. Read it as a study in restraint, because restraint is rarer than courage.

Be ready for the honest chapters on slavery. Both authors deal with it plainly. Ellis is shorter and sharper, and Chernow is warmer and more detailed. Neither one is a hit piece.

When you have to work with people who think they should have your job

Lincoln. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals follows the men Lincoln beat for the 1860 Republican nomination: Seward, Chase and Bates. Then he put all three in his cabinet. It reads like a novel about egos, with a war in the background.

The best habit in the book is a small one. When Lincoln was furious with a general or a colleague, he wrote the angry letter and then didn't send it. After Gettysburg he wrote one to General Meade for letting Lee's army slip away. It was found after his death, marked as never sent. Try that once with an email.

It runs around 750 pages. That's a good audiobook, and a good one to borrow. More on that below.

When you've failed and nobody's calling

Grant. Before the war, Ulysses S. Grant was working in his family's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, with a reputation as a man who couldn't make anything stick. Chernow's Grant takes that failure seriously, and then shows what came after. It's the best argument I know against writing yourself off at thirty-eight.

At Appomattox he let Lee's men keep their horses and mules for spring planting. That one decision did more for the peace than any speech. Chernow also covers Grant's drinking and his fight against the Klan as president, without softening either.

The last chapters are the ones fathers should read twice. Grant was ruined financially, dying of throat cancer, and wrote his memoirs to leave his family something. He finished days before he died. If the book hooks you, his own Personal Memoirs are a clean, plain-spoken read. They sit beside the books in War Memoirs From the Men Who Were Actually There.

When you're in over your head

Truman. David McCullough's Truman runs about a thousand pages and doesn't feel like it. Harry Truman failed at a haberdashery in Kansas City. He'd been vice president for 82 days when Roosevelt died in April 1945. He took the oath without knowing about the atomic bomb project, and learned the details after.

What McCullough shows is an ordinary man who did the homework, made the call and owned it. The sign on his desk said "The buck stops here," and the book shows he meant it. Whatever you think of his decisions, the firing of General MacArthur included, he never hid behind anybody. He believed civilians run the military, and he acted on it when it cost him badly.

Flag: the book covers the end of the Pacific war, including the atomic bombings, and the Korean War. Nothing is gratuitous, but it's war, and it's heavy.

When the right call is the unpopular one

Adams. McCullough's John Adams is a better place to start than you'd think. In 1770, after the Boston Massacre, Adams agreed to defend the British soldiers on trial. He knew it would cost him with his neighbors. Most of the soldiers were acquitted.

He was also vain and thin-skinned, and McCullough doesn't hide it. That's the useful part, because you get a man with real flaws who still held the line when it counted. The letters between John and Abigail run through the whole book. It's one of the best portraits of a marriage as a working partnership I've read.

When you know what you believe and need to make it stick

Reagan. H.W. Brands's Reagan: The Life is a fair-handed, readable biography of a man who'd been a union president before he was a governor. In August 1981, months into his first term, he fired the air traffic controllers who defied a back-to-work order. He'd said what he'd do and he did it. Other countries noticed.

Brands also covers the March 1981 shooting, and how Reagan handled the weeks after. You'll come away with a good sense of how conviction and patience fit together, which most people treat as opposites.

How to read one of these

Don't try to finish a thousand pages in a month. Twenty pages a day gets you through most of these in six to eight weeks. Read at the same hour every day, ideally before the phone comes out.

Buying all six will cost you real money. Don't. A library card gets you the print copy, the ebook and often the audiobook, which I cover in What Your Library Card Is Actually Worth. Audio works well for the long ones, especially in the truck.

Who suits what:

• A teenage son: His Excellency or Truman. Both are clean, and the leadership comes through in the story.
• Someone new to history: Team of Rivals, because it reads like a novel.
• A man carrying a failure: Grant.
• A man who's been handed more than he feels ready for: Truman.

Mature content, in short: war and battle in every one of them, a frank look at slavery in the Washington and Lincoln books, drinking in Grant, and the atomic bomb in Truman. Nothing sexual, nothing crude. Read them first if you're handing them to a younger teen, and read along with him if you can.

Once you've finished one, the next step is Twenty Books Every Man Should Read Before Forty.

Start with the problem you actually have this month. Then open to page one.