Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2014
528 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
An extraordinarily vivid and personal portrait of America's greatest political family and its enormous impact on our nation - the tie-in volume to the PBS documentary to air in the fall of 2014.
This handsome, engaging, revelatory book is an intimate history of three extraordinary individuals from the same extraordinary family - Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Geoffrey C. Ward, distilling more than thirty years of thinking and writing about the Roosevelts, and the acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns help us understand for the first time that, despite the fierce partisanship of their eras and ours, the Roosevelts were far more united than divided. All the history the Roosevelts made is here, but this is primarily a book about human beings, each of whom somehow overcame obstacles that would have undone less forceful personalities, and all of whom wrestled in their lives with issues still familiar to the rest of us-anger and the need for forgiveness, courage and cowardice, confidence and self-doubt, loyalty to family and the need to be oneself. This is the story of the Roosevelts - no other American family ever touched so many lives.
"Starred Review. Teddy's early ill-health, FDR's polio, and Eleanor's lack of confidence, especially in the face of her husband's infidelity, resulted in their individual drives to succeed as well as in the compelling nature of their life stories." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Part history, part biography, Ward and Burns strike the perfect balance between information and entertainment, keeping the tone casual yet authoritative. It would be a monumental task to cover any one of the three in full detail; this, then, is the perfect coffee table book treatment for such a trio." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Excellent, as we have come to expect from the team of Ward and Burns - an eye-opening look at a political dynasty worthy of the name and at a state of politics far better than our own." - Kirkus
This information about The Roosevelts was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Geoffrey C. Ward, historian and screenwriter, is the author of 16 books, including A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has written or cowritten many documentary films, including The War, The Civil War, Baseball, The West, Mark Twain, Not for Ourselves Alone, and Jazz. He lives in New York City.
Ken Burns, the producer and director of numerous film series, including The War, founded his own documentary film company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His landmark film The Civil War was the highest-rated series in the history of American public tv, and his work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and a nomination for an Academy Award. He lives in Walpole, New Hampshire.
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