At last, here is the book I wanted to read on Grover Cleveland. It was, unbeknownst to me, underway while I was working on ‘The Cleveland Reader,’ with the same desire to see ‘Grove,’ inexplicably marginalized as he has been over the last seventy years, restored to a deserved place of honor among Presidents. Any biography since Nevins’ masterpiece, A Study in Courage (and his collection of Cleveland’s Letters), labors in the protective shadows of the scholar’s initial efforts. However, Mr. Senik’s biography has done what all excellent biographers should do: elucidate the era in which the subject lives, both capable of sympathizing with his strengths and ably critiquing his weaknesses. He has demystified the Gilded Age for those who find Cleveland’s America a perplexing, even alien, world. It remains one of the most unstudied periods of U. S. history. The service rendered by Mr. Senik to guide readers through the tariff, pensions, civil service reform, election processes, and foreign policy equips even the novice with a confidence that post-Reconstruction America is not an intimidating, mapless wilderness but a country now known to us. His early mention of Cal Coolidge gave us hope that he would come back to Cal in the Afterword, itself a superb essay on why Cleveland has fallen in estimation and why he ranks higher than popular consciousness places him. Mr. Senik did not go back to connect Coolidge, however, at the end of his book and yet that is one small flaw in an otherwise superlative work. Cleveland was that anomaly of defiant honesty and self-sacrificing obligation that makes him an instant statesman, struggling to descend to common politician. It was against his nature. Nevertheless, this ‘man of iron’ can continue to inform our public discourse and enrich our political future, if we dare to partake of even an ounce of his courage and character.