Professor Lurie is best known for his works on US legal history, and therefore it should come as little surprise that he has written a biographical study of William Howard Taft. After graduating from Yale and then Cincinnati Law School, Taft started his career with a seemingly clear trajectory in mind: up through the ranks of the US judicial system toward his dream of becoming Chief Justice of the United States. Lurie notes the effects of Taft's legal mind and steady judiciousness upon his actions in the various roles he undertook between 1900 and 1913, when his career veered in unexpected directions: Taft served variously as civil governor of the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, and President of the United States. Despite the fact that this volume covers an extremely varied sixty or so years of Taft's life, it ends not with his death in 1930 but with his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1921. One might therefore assume that the planned second volume of the biography will focus upon the far shorter period of Taft's life during his time on the Supreme Court, reaffirming a sense that Lurie is primarily interested in exploring the legal side of Taft's life and character.

As the volume's introduction suggests, Taft's life story has been somewhat starved of attention due to historians' clear preference for the two other key Presidents of his generation, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. As a result, Lurie's biography seeks to provide a portrait of Taft with “a variety of colors, shadings, and conclusions to give it relevance” (x). However, given that this volume coincides with the centenary of the famous presidential election of 1912, it is not surprising that in the last few years a number of other works have been published on Taft and this period. The most obvious author to consider here is Lewis Gould, whose books Four Hats in the Ring (2008) and The William Howard Taft Presidency (2009) have stolen some of the impact that Lurie's book might otherwise have had.

Lurie's main objective in this volume is not to tell a new story, but to reinterpret an existing narrative. His primary aim is to reposition Taft more clearly as a “progressive conservative” and not the more orthodox conservative of many mainstream twentieth-century interpretations – even if Lurie is not the first historian to have acknowledged Taft's progressive traits. The author concludes that Taft was a figure whose progressivism has been overlooked largely due to his lack of dramatic flair, coupled with the fact that his presidency lacked any events of real urgency that might have attracted more public attention. A notable secondary aim of the book is to explore the disintegration of the relationship between Taft and Roosevelt, which the author sees as originating after Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1904, rather than after Taft's election in 1908 as many others suggest.

Overall, Lurie has written a biography that is both scholarly and very readable, and which covers the period before Taft reached the presidency in far greater detail than the leading presidency-focussed studies by Coletta (1973), Anderson (1973), and Gould (2009). Lurie's book presents a synthesis of primary research and up-to-date secondary literature, and – when combined with its planned second volume – should provide students and general readers alike with the best biography of Taft beyond the presidency since Henry Pringle's classic treatment of 1939.