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5 Star review posted on Amazon.com
"A guidance counselor's dream, January 18, 2009

Presidential Education: Prelude to Power is a collection of short histories that contrast the presidential youth over the span of our great nation. We can identify through the rich flavor of the times as to how we as a nation have developed, and what we as a people have lost.

"Barbara Olexer really invokes the human spirit of the men that shaped our nation, giving us insight as to who they really were. The reading of this book provoked profound and memorable dreams.

"I received startling insights that both disillusioned me for some men I had held in high esteem, and raised my respect for others I had held low opinions of. A few that I idolized I feel just to revere them.

"As a parent I found this work inspirational. Bryan P. Loveness"

“Presidential Education: Prelude to Power by Barbara J. Olexer

“This is a short course in the development of American culture. The boys who grew up to be president came from all classes from the fabulously wealthy to the incredibly poor. Some came from cities but most were from farms or farm towns. With few exceptions they wanted good educations. Many of these young men worked their way through college and some underwent the most exacting privations to gratify that wish.

“War interrupted the education of some. James Monroe fought under George Washington and Gen. William Alexander (aka Lord Stirling) but military reorganization cast him adrift right in the middle of the Revolutionary War and he returned to Virginia to study law under Thomas Jefferson. Bill Clinton got so caught up in and confused by the draft laws during the Vietnam War that he left Oxford without taking his degree when he was a Fulbright Scholar.

“A number of the young men who would one day be president taught school. James Garfield was hired to teach a rural one-room school that the older boys delighted in breaking up and sending the teacher to look for other employment. In spite of their best efforts, including an attempt to brain him with a length of stove wood, Garfield tamed the rowdies and brought order to his classroom.

“The chapter on Ulysses S. Grant is especially poignant. Olexer tells us the names of the famous Civil War officers who were at West Point when he was. She also gives details of Grant’s Mexican War career. It is somewhat eerie to read about Grant and Pierre G.T. Beauregard creeping up on an adobe house together as Robert E. Lee and George McClellan watched.

“Only a few of these young men traveled to any great extent in their first twenty-five years (each essay concludes at the 25^th birthday). John Quincy Adams did travel widely in Europe and at the age of fourteen went to Russia as secretary to the first U.S. Minister to the Court of Catherine the Great. Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to Europe eight times between the ages of two and fifteen.

“All in all, Olexer has done an exemplary job of delineating the presidents’ educations. I wish now for a companion volume of brief essays on the careers of these men to make it easy to see what kind of man each turned out to be (Who remembers the presidencies of, for instance, Martin Van Buren and Rutherford B. Hayes?). Perhaps such a volume would also show how each one’s education affected his later life. Ruby Doyle, January 2009”