AN HONEST PRESIDENT The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland

Reader Raymond Todd, like his subject, President Grover Cleveland, remains stodgy and proper as he renders a weighty and instructive period of American history, the latter part of the 1800s. Todd lowers his already low voice and modifies his inflection to quote Cleveland, an important feature in a biography with many quotations. Believed to have weighed 300 pounds, the rotund statesman was called "Uncle Jumbo" by his family, and we hear many examples of his speaking and writing in "polysyllabic profundities." The honest man survives a secret and wide excision of an oral cancer aboard a yacht on the Potomac, but not running a Democratic administration during the depression of 1893. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 02/ JAN 03]