No Ordinary Time

[lightreads]

No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
What it says on the tin – 800 pages on Eleanor and Franklin, personal and political, from 1940-1945. The thing that's good about it is the same thing that's frustrating: this is a book about their marriage, their friends, the war, race relations, the rise of organized labor, the new women's workforce, etc. etc. So it's wide-ranging and densely woven, but because it's so diverse, it occasionally lacks cohesion and true depth. Her Team of Rivals did better, there.



Also, I was quite put off by the handling of Franklin's disability. Yet again I'm confronted with a scholar who seems to possess a keen eye for the rhetorical shades of meaning in history, except where it comes to disability, where it's all shallow platitudes. Where she addresses it at all. Which makes her complicit in the conspiracy of silence FDR himself carried on. Thus the three stars.




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