Free Republic

"The Reagan Diaries" by Ronald Reagan (HarperCollins, 784 pages, $35) The human voice is a stirring thing, as unique as a fingerprint, with its own ability to conjure a sense of place and time. Reading a diary written in a familiar voice offers an added sense of intimacy with its subject, a kind of literary immediacy. So it is with the diaries of former President Ronald Reagan. All through them, we can hear that strength, that ringing confidence, that humor. Reagan's diaries were composed in longhand at the end of most days, written in five volumes that are on display...

WASHINGTON, June 11 — Nancy Reagan started her seventh day of mourning Friday bowed over her husband's coffin in the Rotunda of the Capitol. By the time the sun set in California 12 hours later, Mrs. Reagan had attended a state funeral at National Cathedral, a formal send-off at Andrews Air Force Base and, after a cross-country flight aboard an Air Force jumbo jet, Ronald Reagan's burial on a hillside outside Los Angeles. For Mrs. Reagan, it was an exhausting and emotional test of endurance, all the more so for an 82-year-old woman who, as friends noted, for 10 years...