Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The American Presidents Series: The 32nd President, 1933-1945
Written by Roy Jenkins
Narrated by Richard Rohan
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A masterly, posthumous work by the New York Times bestselling author of Churchill and Gladstone
A protean figure and a man of massive achievement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only man to be elected to the presidency more than twice. In a ranking of chief executives, no more than three of his predecessors could truly be placed in contention with his standing, and of his successors, there are so far none.
In acute, stylish language, Roy Jenkins tackles all of the nuances and intricacies of FDR's character. He was a skilled politician with astounding flexibility; he oversaw an incomparable mobilization of American industrial and military effort; and all the while aroused great loyalty and dazzled those around him with his personal charm. Despite several setbacks and one apparent catastrophe, his life was buoyed by the influence of Eleanor, who was not only a wife but an adviser and one of the twentieth century's greatest political reformers.
Nearly complete before Jenkins's death in January 2003, this volume was finished by historian Richard Neustadt.
Roy Jenkins
Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, Roy Jenkins (B: 1920) served in several major posts in Harold Wilson's First Government and as Home Secretary from 1965-1967. In 1987, Jenkins was elected to succeed Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the University of Oxford following the latter's death, a position he held until his own death in 2003. Jenkins grew to political maturity during the twilight of a great age of British parliamentary democracy. As much as Churchill, though in quite a different way, Jenkins was from the cradle a creature of the system that nurtured Palmerston and Disraeli, Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George.
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Reviews for Franklin Delano Roosevelt
36 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While it’s expected that distilling a four-term president’s life into 186 pages would affect one’s writing style, the writing in this short biography has a molasses-type quality and makes for some slow reading. Too many sentences, in my view, are overly separated with commas, em dashes, and parentheses. Extended thoughts and asides aside, however, the author’s treatment of FDR’s life in interesting. Roy Jenkins (now dead) was an English politician and in the book he brings an obvious foreign perspective to his subject. As part of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr’s American Presidents series, a series of condensed biographies for “the busy reader,” the book is informative but not complete.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Being a once-over-lightly on the influential FDR, released as an entry in a 'less-is-more' series which examines American presidents by turning well-regarded writers loose to cut to what they consider the most important aspects of their subjects' lives and legacies. In this case the approach succeeds handsomely; entrusted to an Englishman, the account contains a certain concentration on Anglo-American relations and the European war in general. The book is concise and insightful and will take few readers more than a week to read.