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 ...

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 ...

Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt (and the author of a critically panned biography of Ronald Reagan), has returned with the third and final volume of his ...

Last things first. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the third volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's monumental biography of Eleanor Roosevelt is the way it ends. I don't think I've ever read another ...

Maybe it’s because we’re in an election year that I’ve had a renewed interest in those who have occupied the Oval Office. For a while I took a crack at Scott McClellan’s book, “What Happened,” on his ...

“The Woman Behind the New Deal” (Doubleday, 398 pages, $35), by Kirstin Downey: Reading the biography of FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins brings to mind the old saying about how Ginger Rogers had ...

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 ...

Beloved and reviled, a spokeswoman for progressive causes who fashioned an independent life within a complicated marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt cuts a surprisingly contemporary figure. For several ...

Last things first. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the third volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's monumental biography of Eleanor Roosevelt is the way it ends. I don't think I've ever read another ...