Though not as bad as the Millard Fillmore book in this series, it is clear from the very beginning that Annette Gordon-Reed's focus in this biography is not to present the story of Andrew Johnson's life but rather to paint him as a racist based on 21st century ideals of morality and concepts. While not the most enlightened person of his time, based on my prior readings, it can be argued that Andrew Johnson's ideas of race were not far off from the standard concepts of the time, something which Annette Gordon-Reed willingly chooses to not explore or address in this book, instead painting Johnson as an aberration whose views towards African-Americans are only shared by former Confederates. Despite her bias, she does make some interesting observations about how Johnson's concepts of the Constitution and the state of the Union were in fact out of sync with the realities of the post-War America and the political thinking of a good number of his contemporaries. I wish that she would have focused more on observations like that to help the reader to understand the subject of her biography and truly utilized what seem to be her astute abilities to analyze the historical record. I think she did herself and her readers a disservice as it would have made for a much more interesting biography instead of the dismissive volume her audience is currently left with.