When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was new to the national scene. Of the many questions reporters asked to fill in the picture of the man, one was almost impossible for him to answer: his favorite book. A voracious speed reader, proficient in Spanish, with a vast and eclectic taste in literature, he had taken hundreds of authors to heart. Forced to decide, Carter chose James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941), which documented the depredations that Southern sharecroppers suffered in the Great Depression.
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