by Hazel Rowley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2010
A focused account of a complex marriage that continues to fascinate.
A distinguished biographer’s fresh take on the marriage of the Roosevelts, the most dynamic couple ever to occupy the White House.
Scholars agree that Eleanor Roosevelt transformed the role of First Lady every bit as much as Franklin transformed the presidency. They divide, however, on the “touchy subject” of their unconventional marriage. Most see it as deeply troubled and champion one or the other partner. Rowley (Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, 2005, etc.) declines to take sides, instead portraying the union as a courageous and radical arrangement that fulfilled the needs of each, a partnership as unprecedented as the manner in which they both served the country. By 1925, married 20 years with five surviving children, the Roosevelts were already a nontraditional union, for two reasons: Franklin’s World War I affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer, and his midlife affliction with infantile paralysis. From that point, notwithstanding a continuing deep respect and affection between them, they led largely independent lives, satisfying emotional needs through a series of romantic friendships that expanded the marriage into a kind of community involving colleagues, friends, employees and family. The people, with the exception of Louis Howe, FDR’s longtime political advisor, rarely overlapped. Eleanor’s circle included her bodyguard, a young socialist and her late-life personal doctor. She also cultivated close female companions, two Democratic Party activists with whom she lived for a time and a journalist. Rowley explores each of these relationships, acknowledges Eleanor’s life on “the edge of the lesbian world,” but admirably refrains from declarations for which she has no evidence. Franklin’s intimates included a distant cousin, flirtations with a woman publisher and most importantly, his personal secretary, “Missy” LeHand. Intending not to idealize the marriage, the author nevertheless touches too lightly on the Roosevelts’ powerful and devouring neediness. Their thoroughly undistinguished children were not least among the broken hearts and confused minds these two titans left behind.
A focused account of a complex marriage that continues to fascinate.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-15857-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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