Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team

Daniel O’Brien is the head writer and creative director of video for Cracked.com, the most-viewed comedy website on the Internet. His work has been featured on Comedy Central and in Splitsider, Forbes, USA Today, and Huffington Post. Daniel is also the co-editor of You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News, a New York Times bestseller, and is the pop culture expert on History Channel’s Your Bleeped Up Brain. When Daniel isn’t researching wacky trivia on our presidents, he can be found playing with his dog, Jackson, who is named after a president. Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team is his first book for young readers.
 
Winston Rowntree is a columnist at Cracked.com and the author of the webcomic Subnormality. He recently won the Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Web Comic of the Year for his comic Watching. His background in comics and interest in history inspired Winston to put an amusing and sometimes weird twist on the illustrations for each president. This is his first book for young readers.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Gr 5–8—Using information about each dead president's early life, quirky tidbits from his term, and unabashedly biased character judgments, O'Brien presents his recommendations for a presidential dream team—featuring the key components of brains, brawn, a loose cannon, a moral compass, and a Roosevelt (wild card). A bright, bold, comic book-like cover and Rowntree's illustrations bring the presidents to life, caricaturing them as gangsters, wrestlers, and superheroes. Each presidential section includes a narrative of the man's childhood, rise to power, presidency, and death. The tone is reverential bordering on worshipful. O'Brien manages to avoid any actual discussion of the many unsavory policies and actions of the presidents by either glossing over or ignoring them, offering instead bizarre facts and brash commentary. The treatment of African Americans and Native Americans throughout the text is particularly flippant, as each offending president or policy is often "on the wrong side of history." O'Brien also imagines that Chester A. Arthur killed his wife "for the sake of making this chapter more interesting," a truly harmful lesson (that women can be killed for entertainment) for the intended age group. In the "Conclusion" section, O'Brien discusses why he did not include living presidents and addresses questions students might have after reading this volume. VERDICT Readers subjected to O'Brien's biased view of U.S. history will learn little here. Not recommended.—Clara Hendricks, Cambridge Public Library, MA