So You Want to Be President?

Judith St. George's text surveys the American presidency itself rather than any single president, gathering trivia and patterns across the 42 men who had held the office as the book was first published, before George W. Bush's election: their varied prior jobs, their educations, their family lives, their heights and personal quirks, alongside the genuine weight of what some of them actually did in office, the Louisiana Purchase, Depression era relief programs, the founding of the Peace Corps. The book moves through this catalogue with a light, funny touch rather than a solemn one, and closes on a hopeful, open ended note, a silhouetted figure taking the oath of office before a flag waving crowd, implying that the list is not finished and could include its own child readers one day.

David Small illustrates in loose, exaggerated watercolor caricature, drawing the presidents with a genuine cartoonist's wit, oversized heads, absurd domestic mishaps, undignified private moments, that punctures the office's usual solemnity even while St. George's text keeps taking the actual history seriously underneath the jokes.

Built more as a browsable reference than a straight through story, the book works best read a few spreads at a time rather than cover to cover in one sitting; it suits six and up, and it holds up well for reading aloud precisely because each anecdote stands on its own. St. George groups her trivia by theme rather than marching strictly through the presidents in order, so a reader can open to almost any spread and find a complete, self contained joke or fact rather than a fragment that depends on what came several pages before it.