Download or read book FDR written by Jean Edward Smith and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 914 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "A model presidential biography... Now, at last, we have a biography that is right for the man" - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World One of today’s premier biographers has written a modern, comprehensive, indeed ultimate book on the epic life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this superlative volume, Jean Edward Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to provide an engrossing narrative of one of America’s greatest presidents. This is a portrait painted in broad strokes and fine details. We see how Roosevelt’ s restless energy, fierce intellect, personal magnetism, and ability to project effortless grace permitted him to master countless challenges throughout his life. Smith recounts FDR’s battles with polio and physical disability, and how these experiences helped forge the resolve that FDR used to surmount the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threat of totalitarianism. Here also is FDR’s private life depicted with unprecedented candor and nuance, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, formidable yet ever supportive and tender; his wife, Eleanor, whose counsel and affection were instrumental to FDR’s public and individual achievements; Lucy Mercer, the great romantic love of FDR’s life; and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose adoration of her boss was practically limitless. Smith also tackles head-on and in-depth the numerous failures and miscues of Roosevelt’ s public career, including his disastrous attempt to reconstruct the Judiciary; the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans; and Roosevelt’s occasionally self-defeating Executive overreach. Additionally, Smith offers a sensitive and balanced assessment of Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, noting its breakthroughs and shortcomings. Summing up Roosevelt’s legacy, Jean Smith declares that FDR, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. It was Roosevelt who revolutionized the art of campaigning and used the burgeoning mass media to garner public support and allay fears. But more important, Smith gives us the clearest picture yet of how this quintessential Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man’s president. The result is a powerful account that adds fresh perspectives and draws profound conclusions about a man whose story is widely known but far less well understood. Written for the general reader and scholars alike, FDR is a stunning biography in every way worthy of its subject.

Download or read book Franklin Delano Roosevelt written by Conrad Black and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 1329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands astride American history like a colossus, having pulled the nation out of the Great Depression and led it to victory in the Second World War. Elected to four terms as president, he transformed an inward-looking country into the greatest superpower the world had ever known. Only Abraham Lincoln did more to save America from destruction. But FDR is such a large figure that historians tend to take him as part of the landscape, focusing on smaller aspects of his achievements or carping about where he ought to have done things differently. Few have tried to assess the totality of FDR's life and career. Conrad Black rises to the challenge. In this magisterial biography, Black makes the case that FDR was the most important person of the twentieth century, transforming his nation and the world through his unparalleled skill as a domestic politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary -- all of which he accomplished despite a physical infirmity that could easily have ended his public life at age thirty-nine. Black also takes on the great critics of FDR, especially those who accuse him of betraying the West at Yalta. Black opens a new chapter in our understanding of this great man, whose example is even more inspiring as a new generation embarks on its own rendezvous with destiny.

Download or read book Who Was Franklin Roosevelt written by Margaret Frith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although polio left him wheelchair bound, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression and served as president during World War II. Elected four times, he spent thirteen years in the White House. How he led the country through tremendously difficult problems, much like the ones facing America today, makes for a timely and engrossing biography.

Download or read book Franklin Delano Roosevelt written by Roy Jenkins and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-11-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In acute, stylish prose, Jenkins tackles all of the nuances and intricacies of FDRUs character--a masterly work by the "New York Times" bestselling author of "Churchill" and "Gladstone."

Download or read book Franklin D Roosevelt written by Roger Daniels and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having guided the nation through the worst economic crisis in its history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt by 1939 was turning his attention to a world on the brink of war. The second part of Roger Daniels's biography focuses on FDR's growing mastery in foreign affairs. Relying on FDR's own words to the American people and eyewitness accounts of the man and his accomplishments, Daniels reveals a chief executive orchestrating an immense wartime effort. Roosevelt had effective command of military and diplomatic information and unprecedented power over strategic military and diplomatic affairs. He simultaneously created an arsenal of democracy that armed the Allies while inventing the United Nations intended to ensure a lasting postwar peace. FDR achieved these aims while expanding general prosperity, limiting inflation, and continuing liberal reform despite an increasingly conservative and often hostile Congress. Although fate robbed him of the chance to see the victory he had never doubted, events in 1944 assured him that the victory he had done so much to bring about would not be long delayed. A compelling reconsideration of Roosevelt the president and campaigner, The War Years, 1939-1945 provides new views and vivid insights about a towering figure--and six years that changed the world.

Download or read book Franklin Delano Roosevelt written by Alan Brinkley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No president since the founders has done more to shape the character of American government," notes Alan Brinkley in this magnificent biography of America's thirty-second president. "And no president since Lincoln has served through darker or more difficult times. Roosevelt thrived in crisis. It brought out his greatness, and his guile. It triggered his almost uncanny ability to communicate effectively with people of all kinds. And at times, it helped him excoriate his enemies, and to revel in doing so." This brilliant, compact biography chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rise from a childhood of privilege to a presidency that forever changed the face of international diplomacy, the American party system, and the government's role in global and domestic policy. Brinkley, the National Book Award-winning New Deal historian, provides a clear, concise introduction to Roosevelt's sphinx-like character and remarkable achievements. In a vivid narrative packed with telling anecdotes, the book moves swiftly from Roosevelt's youth in upstate New York--characterized by an aristocratic lifestyle of trips to Europe and private tutoring--to his schooling at Harvard, his brief law career, and his initial entry into politics. From there, Brinkley chronicles Roosevelt's rise to the presidency, a position in which FDR remained until death, through an unparalleled three-plus terms in office. Throughout the book, Brinkley elegantly blends FDR's personal life with his professional one, providing a lens into the President's struggles with polio and his somewhat distant relationship with the first lady. Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States through the worst economic crisis in the nation's history and through the greatest and most terrible war ever recorded. His extraordinary legacy remains alive in our own troubled new century as a reminder of what bravery and strong leadership can accomplish.

Download or read book Becoming FDR written by Jonathan Darman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An illuminating account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggles with polio steeled him for the great struggles of the Depression and of World War II.”—Jon Meacham “A valuable book for anyone who wants to know how adversity shapes character. By understanding how FDR became a deeper and more empathetic person, we can nurture those traits in ourselves and learn from the challenges we all face.”—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci In popular memory, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the quintessential political “natural.” Born in 1882 to a wealthy, influential family and blessed with an abundance of charm and charisma, he seemed destined for high office. Yet for all his gifts, the young Roosevelt nonetheless lacked depth, empathy, and an ability to think strategically. Those qualities, so essential to his success as president, were skills he acquired during his seven-year journey through illness and recovery. Becoming FDR traces the riveting story of the struggle that forged Roosevelt’s character and political ascent. Soon after contracting polio in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine, the former failed vice-presidential candidate was left paralyzed from the waist down. He spent much of the next decade trying to rehabilitate his body and adapt to the stark new reality of his life. By the time he reemerged on the national stage in 1928 as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York, his character and his abilities had been transformed. He had become compassionate and shrewd by necessity, tailoring his speeches to inspire listeners and to reach them through a new medium—radio. Suffering cemented his bond with those he once famously called “the forgotten man.” Most crucially, he had discovered how to find hope in a seemingly hopeless situation—a skill that he employed to motivate Americans through the Great Depression and World War II. The polio years were transformative, too, for the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, and for Eleanor herself, who became, at first reluctantly, her husband's surrogate at public events, and who grew to become a political and humanitarian force in her own right. Tracing the physical, political, and personal evolution of the iconic president, Becoming FDR shows how adversity can lead to greatness, and to the power to remake the world.

Download or read book The Man He Became written by James Tobin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, from James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, is the story of the greatest comeback in American political history, a saga long buried in half-truth, distortion, and myth—Franklin Roosevelt’s ten-year climb from paralysis to the White House. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. “He’s through,” said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man, as they and the nation would learn in time. With a painstaking reexamination of original documents, James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelt’s fateful partnership with his wife, Eleanor; and he shows that FDR’s true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the disabled. Tobin also explodes the conventional wisdom of recent years—that FDR deceived the public about his condition. In fact, Roosevelt and his chief aide, Louis Howe, understood that only by displaying himself as a man who had come back from a knockout punch could FDR erase the perception that had followed him from childhood—that he was a pampered, too smooth pretty boy without the strength to lead the nation. As Tobin persuasively argues, FDR became president less in spite of polio than because of polio. The Man He Became affirms that true character emerges only in crisis and that in the shaping of this great American leader character was all.

Download or read book Traitor to His Class written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A brilliant evocation of one of the greatest presidents in American history by the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War "It may well be the best general biography of Franklin Roosevelt we will see for many years to come.” —The Christian Science Monitor Drawing on archival material, public speeches, correspondence and accounts by those closest to Roosevelt early in his career and during his presidency, H. W. Brands shows how Roosevelt transformed American government during the Depression with his New Deal legislation, and carefully managed the country's prelude to war. Brands shows how Roosevelt's friendship and regard for Winston Churchill helped to forge one of the greatest alliances in history, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin maneuvered to defeat Germany and prepare for post-war Europe. Look for H.W. Brands's other biographies: THE FIRST AMERICAN (Benjamin Franklin), ANDREW JACKSON, THE MAN WHO SAVED THE UNION (Ulysses S. Grant), and REAGAN.

Download or read book A President in Our Midst written by Kaye Lanning Minchew and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Georgia forty-one times between 1924 and 1945. This rich gathering of photographs and remembrances documents the vital role of Georgia’s people and places in FDR’s rise from his position as a despairing politician daunted by disease to his role as a revered leader who guided the country through its worst depression and a world war. A native New Yorker, FDR called Georgia his “other state.” Seeking relief from the devastating effects of polio, he was first drawn there by the reputed healing powers of the waters at Warm Springs. FDR immediately took to Georgia, and the attraction was mutual. Nearly two hundred photos show him working and convalescing at the Little White House, addressing crowds, sparring with reporters, visiting fellow polio patients, and touring the countryside. Quotes by Georgians from a variety of backgrounds hint at the countless lives he touched during his time in the state. In Georgia, away from the limelight, FDR became skilled at projecting strength while masking polio’s symptoms. Georgia was also his social laboratory, where he floated new ideas to the press and populace and tested economic recovery projects that were later rolled out nationally. Most important, FDR learned to love and respect common Americans—beginning with the farmers, teachers, maids, railroad workers, and others he met in Georgia.

Download or read book His Final Battle written by Joseph Lelyveld and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg In March 1944, as World War II raged and America’s next presidential election loomed, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Driven by a belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end, Roosevelt concealed his failing health and sought a fourth term—a term that he knew he might not live to complete. With unparalleled insight and deep compassion, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joseph Lelyveld delves into Roosevelt’s thoughts, preoccupations, and motives during his last sixteen months, which saw the highly secretive Manhattan Project, the roar of D-Day, the landmark Yalta Conference and FDR’s hopes for a new world order—all as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax. His Final Battle delivers an extraordinary portrait of this famously inscrutable man, who was full of contradictions but a consummate leader to the very last.

Download or read book No Ordinary Time written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the distinct leadership roles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years and discusses the dynamics of their marriage.

Download or read book FDR and the News Media written by Betty Houchin Winfield and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power was at the heart of FDR's relationship with the media: the power of the nation's chief executive to control his public messages versus the power of the free press to act as an independent watchdog over the president and the government. This compelling study points to Roosevelt's consummate news management as a key to his political artistry and leadership legacy.

Download or read book American Default written by Sebastian Edwards and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how FDR did the unthinkable to save the American economy.

Download or read book Man of Destiny written by Alonzo L Hamby and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an acclaimed historian comes an authoritative and balanced biography of FDR, based on previously untapped sources No president looms larger in twentieth-century American history than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and few life stories can match his for sheer drama. Following in the footsteps of his Republican cousin President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR devoted himself to politics as a Democrat and a true man of the people. Eventually setting his sights on the presidency, he was elected to office in 1932 by a nation that was mired in the Great Depression and desperate for revival. As the distinguished historian Alonzo Hamby argues in this authoritative biography, FDR's record as president was more mixed than we are often led to believe. The New Deal provided much-needed assistance to millions of Americans, but failed to restore prosperity, and while FDR became an outstanding commander-in-chief during World War II, his plans for the postwar world were seriously flawed. No less perceptive is Hamby's account of FDR's private life, which explores the dynamics of his marriage and his romance with his wife's secretary, Lucy Mercer. Hamby documents FDR's final months in intimate detail, claiming that his perseverance, despite his serious illness, not only shaped his presidency, but must be counted as one of the twentieth century's great feats of endurance. Hamby reveals a man whose personality -- egocentric, undisciplined in his personal appetites, at times a callous user of aides and associates, yet philanthropic and caring for his nation's underdogs-shaped his immense legacy. Man of Destiny is a measured account of the life, both personal and public, of the most important American leader of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Franklin D Roosevelt written by Roger Daniels and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franklin D. Roosevelt, consensus choice as one of three great presidents, led the American people through the two major crises of modern times. The first volume of an epic two-part biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 presents FDR from a privileged Hyde Park childhood through his leadership in the Great Depression to the ominous buildup to global war. Roger Daniels revisits the sources and closely examines Roosevelt's own words and deeds to create a twenty-first century analysis of how Roosevelt forged the modern presidency. Daniels's close analysis yields new insights into the expansion of Roosevelt's economic views; FDR's steady mastery of the complexities of federal administrative practices and possibilities; the ways the press and presidential handlers treated questions surrounding his health; and his genius for channeling the lessons learned from an unprecedented collection of scholars and experts into bold political action. Revelatory and nuanced, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 reappraises the rise of a political titan and his impact on the country he remade.

Download or read book FDR in American Memory written by Sara Polak and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was FDR's image constructed—by himself and others—as such a powerful icon in American memory? In polls of historians and political scientists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt consistently ranks among the top three American presidents. Roosevelt enjoyed an enormous political and cultural reach, one that stretched past his presidency and across the world. A grand narrative of Roosevelt's crucial role in the twentieth century persists: the notion that American ideology, embodied by FDR, overcame the Depression and won World War II, while fascism, communism, and imperialism—and their ignoble figureheads—fought one another to death in Europe. This grand narrative is flawed and problematic, legitimizing the United States's cultural, diplomatic, and military role in the world order, but it has meant that FDR continues to loom large in American culture. In FDR in American Memory, Sara Polak analyzes Roosevelt's construction as a cultural icon in American memory from two perspectives. First, she examines him as a historical leader, one who carefully and intentionally built his public image. Focusing on FDR's use of media and his negotiation of the world as a disabled person, she shows how he consistently aligned himself with modernity and future-proof narratives and modes of rhetoric. Second, Polak looks at portrayals and negotiations of the FDR icon in cultural memory from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on recent and well-known cultural artifacts—including novels, movies, documentaries, popular biographies, museums, and memorials—she demonstrates how FDR positioned himself as a rhetorically modern and powerful but ideologically almost empty container. That deliberate positioning, Polak writes, continues to allow almost any narrative to adopt him as a relevant historical example even now. As a study of presidential image-fashioning, FDR in American Memory will be of immediate relevance to present-day readers.