At Entropy, Shoshana Seidman writes a review of the gossip-filled “collage of portraits of American presidents” in Alex Forman’s Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents:

 These portraits reveal a side of America that many do not want to face, a country where Presidents lie and cheat, wrestle with clinical depression, profess liberty but enact doctrines of oppression and imperialism. But by humanizing these mythical men, the portraits also speak to a pervading sense of wounded yet pervading patriotism: yes, Lincoln caught syphilis from a prostitute in 1832, but he also liked cats and kittens, and so could you and I. Millard Fillmore may have been illiterate until adulthood, but he was able to become President—an embodiment of the mythical “American Dream”. Moreover, he ate soup for his last meal, and so could you and I.

Interested yet in this dark underbelly, the little facts both negative and positive, of these presidents we know as more than human? Read Seidman’s full review here.