The first year of a new president’s first term is always a crucible. But often it’s only in hindsight, within the carefully considered pages of an authoritative presidential biography, that the full measure of that first year can be taken. In this new series on the best presidential biographies, Miller Center presidential scholars and experts recommend the ones most worth reading.

Being Nixon: A Man Divided (2015) has all the strengths of the best Newsweek cover stories written by author Evan Thomas: to-the-point prose, up-to-date research, and a simultaneously jaundiced and loving eye for Washington’s wicked ways. The biggest weakness: It’s too short. Thomas is fascinated by Nixon’s contradictions, but lacks the space to chase them down every dark alley and up every brilliant peak.

A life of Nixon must be a story of America during the Cold War, an epic centering on an antihero of outsized flaws and strengths. The late Stephen Ambrose’s three-volume biography is about the right scale, and a fun read, but hopelessly dated. Most of the best records about Nixon’s presidency—thousands upon thousands of once-secret documents and the bulk of the voice-triggered White House tape recordings—came out after Ambrose published his final volume in 1991. No recent author has been able to even digest, much less distill, all the available evidence. In One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2015), Tim Weiner trumpets the abundance of new material, then proceeds to ignore most of it in favor of old interpretations. In Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Robert Dallek takes familiar stories of the famous/notorious partnership/rivalry between Nixon and National Security Adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and dresses them in some new details from declassified documents. President Nixon awaits his Homer.

Not so pre-presidential Nixon: Irwin F. Gellman, author of 1999’s The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946 to 1952, and 2015’s The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961, has spent decades digging deeply into Nixon’s politically formative years. Gellman’s archival explorations border on the heroic, but he might be a little too fond of his subject. Sometimes the reader sees two Nixons in his work: an admirable and victimized man who has Gellman’s sympathy, and a far more sinister figure who emerges under his own power from the documentation that the historian has so impressively amassed.