A new light on the Roosevelt clan that serves as illumination of the short life of an unhappy man.
An exploration of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) and her idealization of the father she hardly knew.
In her autobiography, Eleanor wrote that her father “dominated my life as long as he lived” and “was the love of my life for many years after he died.” TV journalist and social historian Burns (The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt, 2016, etc.) makes much of that statement, claiming that Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt (1860-1894), Theodore’s younger brother, “influenced her character more than anyone else ever did” and therefore deserves “the most prominent role he has yet known in a book.” Unfortunately, the author is mostly unpersuasive about Elliott’s influence and in his depiction of the “bond” between father and daughter. Burns draws his information largely from Roosevelt biographies by Joseph Lash, Blanche Wiesen Cook, David McCullough, and others and by a cache of letters between Eleanor and Elliott, written over two years, ending with his death when Eleanor was 10. Elliott was a tormented man, moody, depressed, and beset by demons. By the time he married, he was a “full-fledged alcoholic,” and as the years passed, he became addicted, as well, to laudanum and morphine. During Eleanor’s childhood, he was institutionalized several times—dramatic events kept from his daughter—but never cured. He had at least three affairs, one resulting in the birth of a son, and was estranged from his wife and family. Biographers acknowledge that when he was sober, he was a loving parent, far more so than Eleanor’s cold, dismissive mother, but he was hardly involved in her upbringing. From Burns’ evidence, the man she loved was largely imaginary. The author makes the odd decision to organize the dual biography in nonchronological leaps of time to prove that “theirs was a relationship for the ages.” But the alternating chapters offer a familiar portrait of Eleanor, underscoring how vastly different she was from her father.
A new light on the Roosevelt clan that serves as illumination of the short life of an unhappy man.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-328-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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