The impossible presidency The rise and fall of America's highest office

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) After his best-selling "Between the World and Me," Coates could have cashed in with a standard miscellany. Instead, this master class in the essay charts his ascension as perhaps the important critic of our time. REVOLUTION SONG: A Story of American Freedom, by Russell Shorto. (Norton, $28.95.) George Washington is the hub of Shorto's book, which artfully weaves together the stories of six individuals from the Revolutionary period to give a sense of how far-reaching a phenomenon the War of Independence was. SCHLESINGER: The Imperial Historian, by Richard Aldous. (Norton, $25.95.) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has found in Aldous an agreeably judicious biographer who gracefully balances an appreciation for his subject's talents as a writer of narratives and speeches with an acknowledgment of his shortcomings as a political analyst and aide. SMILE, by Roddy Doyle. (Viking, $25.) Doyle's 11th novel is the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller: The protagonist's life goes off track after a stranger from his past shows up, reminding him of their Catholic school days amid signs of a deeper darkness the narrator refuses to confront. THE IMPOSSIBLE PRESIDENCY: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, by Jeremi Suri. (Basic, $32.) A historian traces the changing role of the presidency from Washington onward, arguing that as the job has become increasingly complex it now involves more than a single person can handle. SCALIA SPEAKS: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, by Antonin Scalia. Edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. (Crown Forum, $30.) This collection of speeches and writing by the famously argumentative Supreme Court justice, who died in February 2016, offers a clear picture of his originalist interpretation of the Constitution. THE THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON: Genius, Partisan, President, by Noah Feldman. (Random House, $35.) America's fourth president shifted his political orientation at least three times in his life. Feldman marks the changes in his nuanced portrait of the founding father. THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, by Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Minna Zallmann Proctor. (New Directions, paper, $12.95.) A Swiss-Italian writer presents short impressionistic takes on Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and the French Symbolist Marcel Schwob. FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, by Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.) Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

"Few leaders are impeached or assassinated; most die from a thousand cuts": an illuminating look at the highest office in the land and its occupants.When the Founding Fathers first wrestled with how to organize a government, writes Suri (Chair, Leadership in Global Affairs, Univ. of Texas; Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama, 2011, etc.), they quickly ascertained that the country "required central leadership that could unify competing interest groups without simultaneously denying their freedom." That leadership was much stronger than the Articles of Confederation envisioned, yet, thanks to a carefully considered system of checks and balances, not tyrannical. Fortunately, the first president was George Washington, who, in the author's view, "defined presidential authority as knowledge and trust-based." The president knew things that were unavailable to ordinary citizens, who in turn had to place their trust in him to represent their interests. Theodore Roosevelt, by contrast, considered himself a kind of dictator or elected king, if a benevolent one who exemplified the progressive notion that smart and vigorous men "could improve a messy democratic process" by taking care of details best left unavailable to ordinary folks. Subsequent presidents have fallen somewhere between the models provided by those two presidents, if not outside them. Ronald Reagan, for instance, shunned the micromanagerial ways of Lyndon Johnson, with the ironic result that his administration was characterized by "policy indisciplinetoo many interventions without careful strategic consideration." On that note, Suri opines that the best use of presidential power is to confine it to a limited set of military, political, and economic objectives, even while noting that presidential power has grown so substantially in the post-World War II era that the office invites redefinition, inasmuch as "democratic leadership requires a vibrant fact-based public sphere, and trusted anchors for informed policy discussions"things that are notable today for their apparent absence. Lively and well-grounded, offering good measures by which to judge our best and worst presidents and their methods of governing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.