A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times.
A comprehensive exploration of one of the most influential women of the last century.
The accomplishments of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) were widespread and substantial, and her trailblazing actions in support of social justice and global peace resonate powerfully in our current moment. Her remarkable life has been extensively documented in a host of acclaimed biographies, including Blanche Wiesen Cook’s excellent three-volume life. Eleanor was also a highly prolific writer in her own right; through memoirs, essays, and letters, she continuously documented experiences and advancing ideas. In the most expansive one-volume portrait to date, Michaelis offers a fresh perspective on some well-worn territory—e.g., Eleanor’s unconventional marriage to Franklin and her progressively charged relationships with men and women, including her intimacy with newspaper reporter Lorena Hickok. The author paints a compelling portrait of Eleanor’s life as an evolving journey of transformation, lingering on the significant episodes to shed nuance on her circumstances and the players involved. Eleanor’s privileged yet dysfunctional childhood was marked by the erratic behavior and early deaths of her flighty, alcoholic father and socially absorbed mother, and she was left to shuttle among equally neglectful relatives. During her young adulthood, her instinctual need to be useful and do good work attracted the attention of notable mentors, each serving to boost her confidence and fine-tune her political and social convictions, shaping her expanding consciousness. As in his acclaimed biography of Charles Schulz, Michaelis displays his nimble storytelling skills, smoothly tracking Eleanor’s ascension from wife and mother to her powerfully influential and controversial role as first lady and continued leadership and activist efforts beyond. Throughout, the author lucidly illuminates the essence of her thinking and objectives. “As Eleanor’s activism evolved,” writes Michaelis, “she did not see herself reaching to solve social problems so much as engaging with individuals to unravel discontinuities between the old order and modernity.”
A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9201-6
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A political reporter’s disjointed account of her starring role in a lurid scandal.
A book about “life in America”—and love (questionable poetry included).
Nuzzi’s clumsy memoir mistakes wordiness for insight and favors coyness over clarity. The 32-year-old reporter covered the president for “many years,” during which she fell in love with a married man she calls “the Politician.” He’s widely reported to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which Nuzzi essentially confirms via many biographical details. The Politician “told me that he wanted me to have his baby” and wrote her “explicit poems,” which she shares: “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you.” Her opacity is unintentionally funny. “I love you, [the Politician],” she writes. Frustratingly, others are cryptically identified, too. One ungainly scene features “the man for whom I worked” and “the man I did not marry.” When the Politician is absent, Nuzzi looks for meaning “in our age of insincerity.” Aiming for a this-is-the-way-we-live-now report from inside a media maelstrom, she includes Q&As with Trump employees, anecdotes about dull-witted men, government files, and observations about technology and consumerism. Hounded by tabloid reporters, she crudely likens her plight to wildfires and gun violence. Upending timeless writing advice, she doesn’t use one word when many will do. When a would-be assassin fires at Trump, he was “clipped on the ear by that which could not kill him.” American politics, Nuzzi, time itself—each is pulled “apart and apart and apart and apart.” Citing a provocative Alfred Hitchcock quote—“Blondes make the best victims”—Nuzzi floats a theory: Trump might be “the first blonde president. Is it any wonder then that he can so easily fetishize his own victimization?” This might be a joke, but like much else in this book, it doesn’t work.
A political reporter’s disjointed account of her starring role in a lurid scandal.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668209851
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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