Wolfe supplies a moving portrait of his dying father, as well as a rich meditation on American history and ambitions. Discussion of the title characters -- Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes -- provides Wolfe an opportunity to assess the mood and promise of the nation as well as to reflect on the obstacles that had blocked paths toward untapped American potential. Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, the four Republican presidents who followed Grant during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, were all Civil War generals and self-made men, though none experienced a distinguished term in office. These presidents are iconic figures in the recollections and political monologues of the teenaged narrator's dying father on the boardinghouse porch. In his efforts to understand their importance to his father, the boy comes to appreciate the act of storytelling that redefines these men in his father's memory and in turn redefines the father in the narrator's memory. - Jacket flap.