Blessed With Good Fortune

Jimmy Carter was fifty-two years old when he was elected president of the United States in 1976. His time in the White House was, as he puts it, “the pinnacle of my political life,” but they were only four years in a life built of service—to his family, to his faith, to his country, and to the world—that has now spanned more than nine decades. This is Carter’s twenty-ninth book, but in his new memoir, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, he looks back for the first time across the full span of his life, from his childhood in Plains through his years in the Navy and his return to the family farm in Georgia, from his political career to his later philanthropic work with the Carter Center. Through it all, as example after example suggests, he took solace from his Christian faith, his family, and—perhaps surprisingly for a man trained as a nuclear engineer—his painting and his poetry.

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