For all the books written about FDR, there's room on the shelf for a great one-volume life that does full justice to who he was, what he overcame and what he achieved. This one isn't it, though it's ...

Pioneering first lady Eleanor Roosevelt got the fully fleshed portrait she deserved in the first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography, which told the compelling story of a shy, lonely rich girl ...

I always try to be as generous as possible to a fellow biographer of the same subject, but I cannot claim that this book brings much that is new to the extensive FDR literature. It is in fact a ...

Intellectuals, academics, and most of the media slapped a halo over FDR to consecrate both his welfare state and his warring. FDR: A New Political Life is an antidote to that servility to Leviathan.

In the skillful writing of biographer Nigel Hamilton, history is a living thing, something you can see and hear, reach out and touch. History has an immediacy for him that has come to life in more ...

(“FDR” by Jean Edward Smith, Random House, 858 pages, $35). In January 1943, after meeting with Franklin Roosevelt at Casablanca on the African coast to plot future military operations during the ...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself ...

Special to The New York Times. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print ...

THIS is a ‘personal' rather than an ‘intimate’ biography, and the reader learns almost as much of Mr. Thayer’s views on recent public questions as of Roosevelt’s creed and conduct. The earlier ...