Not exactly revelatory but an accessible biography that adds to the large body of existing FDR scholarship.
A straightforward, “flesh-and-blood” study of the president that underscores the depth and ambiguity behind the charming facade.
Hamby (Emeritus, History/Ohio Univ.; For the Survival of Democracy, 2007, etc.) recounts his early memories of hearing a Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat and the shocking announcement of his death on April 12, 1945. He fashions this study around the notion of how the life of a great personage shaped an entire era—namely, the way America wanted to see itself. FDR came from old money with a sense of “special social standing,” and he was imbued on both sides of his family with the ideals of “Calvinist piety, thrift and capitalist enterprise”—none of which he actually embraced. An only child adored by his parents, he was an early leader and a bit of a trickster who knew how to get around the proper rules. When his father died and his mother, Sara, devoted herself to him, he was able to maintain his independence and marry the woman he wanted, Eleanor; by his early 20s, he had “honed his skills of manipulation and deception to a scalpel’s edge.” This ability served him well in his increasingly public profile. Deeply influenced by the progressive ideals of his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor’s strong commitment to public duty, FDR was becoming a leader who understood the needs of the people. Hamby moves thematically through the crucial next decades, focusing on FDR’s engagement of one challenge after the next: grim social realities that remained after the exalted victory in World War I; the polio that struck him down—though he transformed his affliction into a crusading philanthropy; and the desperate economic times that prompted him to harness the country to bold new ideas. Hamby also explores what he considers FDR’s crowning achievement: his “defense of democracy” during a horrendous global conflagration.
Not exactly revelatory but an accessible biography that adds to the large body of existing FDR scholarship.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02860-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her...
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture.
“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust." In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne….
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4813-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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