Combing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Legacies of the Presidents

“Few tools for understanding the human animal... can match or surpass the vast... and multidimensional power of our tresses,” asserts Pappas (True Grit), executive director of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in this silly account of presidential locks. Sifting through the history of the presidency, Pappas unearths moments when hair was somehow germane—which mostly involve death or publicity. Beginning the account with the famous photograph of a young Black boy touching Barack Obama’s hair, Pappas meanders through a series of hopelessly unrelated events: George Washington opted for hair powder instead of a wig because that’s what the English wore; hair DNA was used to determine that Andrew Jackson did not die from lead poisoning from the bullets lodged in his body, like many thought; Abraham Lincoln was known for his “shaggy-haired homeliness” in life, and in death that very same messy hairdo “masked the bullet that had shocked the world.” Pappas’s tone veers between dead-serious and obviously tongue-in-cheek (“Hair was critical to the cover-up,” he writes of Grover Cleveland’s secret operation to remove a tumor in his mouth, the aftermath of which was hidden by his mustache), making it unclear if the “shocking impact” of the title is meant as a joke. It’s wacky and weird fun, if a touch exasperating. (Aug.)