Presents eleven interviews, drawn from Jimmy Carter's five decades as a public figure, that capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him - and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party’s identity became increasingly secular and urban by attrition, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of...