filmhwa.blogg.se

Thicker and heavier than any in recent memory, it shut the city down for days. IN FEBRUARY 1884, JUST AS Anna Hall Roosevelt learned that she was pregnant, a blinding fog closed over Manhattan. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever. This “absolutely spellbinding,” ( The Washington Post) “complex and sensitive portrait” ( The Guardian) is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in the White House. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them.

She came to accept her FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men.Įleanor needed emotional connection. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier, social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. The New York Times bestseller from prizewinning author David Michaelis presents a “stunning” ( The Wall Street Journal) breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.