The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

My son was recently looking at a newspaper article about all the statues being erected in Eastern Europe of Ronald Reagan, and had two questions:  What did this man do that was so great they are building statues of him in Eastern Europe, and why do my son's High School teachers all think Reagan was a terrible President?

Alas, I have no easy answer to the second question.  The political beliefs held by members of our public teachers' union are beyond my understanding.  But for the first question, you could do a lot worse than this book, which explains how Reagan, with some help from Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, took a stand that won the cold war and freed Eastern Europe from communist totalitarianism.  A great read, with a great message of how a religious people (in this case, the Catholics of Poland, finding themselves in a similar situation to the Jews of Babylon) can effect real change by resisting assimilation.