Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3
The War Years and After, 1939-1962
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2016
One of NPR's 10 Best Books of 2016
"Heartachingly relevant...the Eleanor Roosevelt who inhabits these meticulously crafted pages transcends both first-lady history and the marriage around which Roosevelt scholarship has traditionally pivoted." -- The Wall Street Journal
The final volume in the definitive biography of America's greatest first lady.
“Monumental and inspirational…Cook skillfully narrates the epic history of the war years… [a] grand biography.” -- The New York Times Book Review
Historians, politicians, critics, and readers everywhere have praised Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt as the essential portrait of a woman who towers over the twentieth century. The third and final volume takes us through World War II, FDR’s death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to struggle for her core issues—economic security, New Deal reforms, racial equality, and rescue—when they were sidelined by FDR while he marshaled the country through war. The chasm between Eleanor and Franklin grew, and the strains on their relationship were as political as they were personal. She also had to negotiate the fractures in the close circle of influential women around her at Val-Kill, but through it she gained confidence in her own vision, even when forced to amend her agenda when her beliefs clashed with government policies on such issues as neutrality, refugees, and eventually the threat of communism. These years—the war years—made Eleanor Roosevelt the woman she became: leader, visionary, guiding light. FDR’s death in 1945 changed her world, but she was far from finished, returning to the spotlight as a crucial player in the founding of the United Nations.
This is a sympathetic but unblinking portrait of a marriage and of a woman whose passion and commitment has inspired generations of Americans to seek a decent future for all people. Modest and self-deprecating, a moral force in a turbulent world, Eleanor Roosevelt was unique.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the third and concluding volume of this splendid biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Cook doesn't have to make a case for her subject. Roosevelt's life and character do that well enough on their own. If there's a theme to the volume, it's the way Roosevelt moved out of her husband's massive shadow during WWII to live an active, complex, and independent life well before F.D.R.'s death in 1945. All the while, she was part of "one of history's most powerful and enduring partnerships" a partnership of "mutual respect and shared commitments" and she was often F.D.R.'s stand-in, though at other times she was silenced for political or security reasons. Always in Roosevelt's corner, Cook skillfully weaves her subject's active and emotional life among friends and family members into the depiction of her public role. The champion of human rights, the anti-Fascist, the foe of anti-Semites, the protector of the ill and infirm, the superb personal diplomat is everywhere in sight, as are Roosevelt's sometimes-bitter disagreements with, and disappointments in, her husband. If there's any criticism of this otherwise superb book, it's that it simply peters out at the end of these three fine volumes, readers look for and deserve a summation, a rounding-out, and Cook never provides one.
