ON MY OWN

In a random, always personal, and usually buoyant manner, Mrs. Roosevelt writes of her incredibly active years since the death of her husband- with just a faint trace of her sadness. She has flitted and skimmed from the South Beas to Jugoslavia, from Lebanon to the convention halls of Chicago. She has dined with and been received by and gone to interview everyone from the Emperor of Japan to Ben-Gurion, Vishinsky, Queen Elizabeth, Dulles and Nehru. She has served as delegate to the UN, at first a bewildered newcomer to international affairs, later a skilled parliamentarian, and finally creator of her own cunning brand of kitchen diplomacy. She has sustained her own circle of friends throughout all this, and never failed in her interminable, year-round shopping expeditions for a grandmother's Christmas. The book is filled with opinions, personal criticisms, contretemps, bits of social commentary, much of it informative- all of it engaging- but none of it even remotely sensational or polemical. Mrs. Roosevelt has rapped a knuckle or two but offended no one. And she appears as a charming and utterly civilized person, to many always America's First Lady.