Growing up in Depression-era Georgia, Jimmy Carter was a long shot for a governorship, let alone the presidency, yet this affable outsider has always been full of surprises. From years of access to Carter and his family, Jonathan Alter traces how he evolved from a bookish child—raised mostly by a black woman farmhand—into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer, then a born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 presidential campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party. Here too is Carter in his productive late-life renaissance, building houses for the poor and teaching Sunday school.