History Book Club split main selection BOMC alternate author tour. The author's portrait offers a fresh perspective on WWII and, more than coincidentally during the debate over the proper role of Hillary Rodham Clinton, depicts how a savvy, relentlessly involved First Lady incalculably enriched and shaped the political and social agendas of the nation. Previous works on the Roosevelts have suggested that, as an adviser, Eleanor was her husband's political and social conscience Goodwin shows in stunning detail that even more, she was his astute political partner, lobbyist and goad.
As Goodwin makes richly evident, Eleanor was a homefront counterpart to Winston Churchill, a partner and provocateur whose relationship with FDR was rarely smooth and often frankly confrontational. Narrating the events of the war from the vantage point of the White House, Goodwin (Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream) reveals a political drama fought in Congress, within the cabinet, in the press and in the living quarters of the executive mansion. Nor has any history of WWII so fully documented the domestic life of the nation during the international crisis. Goodwin has deftly reminded us just how extraordinary FDR and Eleanor were in ‘no ordinary times.No previous biography of a president has given so complete a picture of how private lives and political questions intersect uniquely for the residents of the White House. “A thoroughly terrific and important work, a valuable addition to Roosevelt literature. How their talents, insecurities, and demons impacted on the country and the world will be much better understood with the publication of this remarkable book.”
“A tale rendered nearly seamless by Goodwin’s skills as a reporter and writer, and by the immense entanglement of her subjects’ private and public lives. The reader feels like a resident in the White House.” “The Roosevelt marriage is endlessly gripping because it was so consequential. The sheer abundance of colorful biographical anecdotes and the cumulative weight of telling detail sustain an atmosphere of immediacy and leave a lastingly vivid impression.” The book also explores how they, and their inner circle, managed crisis after crisis, from the Nazi invasion of Western. An ambitiously conceived and imaginatively executed participant’s eye view of the United States in the war years.
“Goodwin has pulled off the double trick of making Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt seem so monumental as to have come from a very distant past, and at the same time so vital as to have been alive only yesterday.”
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