Book picks similar to
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History by Robert E. Sherwood
history
hist
biography
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Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America
James P. Duffy - 2010
Lindbergh a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite? Or was he the target of a vicious personal vendetta by President Roosevelt? In Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt, author James Duffy tackles these questions head-on, by examining the conflicting personalities, aspirations, and actions of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles A. Lindbergh. Painting a politically incorrect portrait of both men, Duffy shows how the hostility between these two American giants divided the nation on both domestic and international affairs. From canceling U.S. air mail contracts to intervening in World War II, Lindberg and Roosevelt’s clash of ideas and opinions shaped the nation’s policies here and abroad. Insightful, and engaging, Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt reveals the untold story about two of history’s most controversial men, and how the White House waged a smear campaign against Lindbergh that blighted his reputation forever.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Manning Marable - 2011
Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912
Gerard Helferich - 2013
The ex-president’s extremism and third-term campaign were downright un-American. Convinced that TR would ignite civil war and leave the nation open to foreign invasion, Schrank answered what he believed to be a divine summons,buying a gun and stalking Roosevelt across seven Southern and Midwestern states, blending into throngs of supporters. In Chattanooga and Chicago, he failed to act. In Milwaukee, on October 14, Schrank crossed TR’s path again—BANG!Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin is the dynamic unfolding account of the audacious attempt on Roosevelt’s life by a lone and fanatical assailant. Based on original sources including police interrogations, eyewitness testimony, and newspaper reports, the book is above all a fast-paced, suspenseful narrative. Drawing from Schrank’s own statements and writings, it also provides a chilling glimpse into the mind of a political assassin. Rich with local color and period detail, it transports the reader to the American heartland during a pivotal moment in our history, when the forces of progressivism and conservatism were battling for the nation’s soul—and the most revered man in America traveled across the country campaigning relentlessly against Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs in what historians agree was the first modern American presidential contest.
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
Megan Marshall - 2013
Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son.Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.
Patton
Martin Blumenson - 1985
Patton. Blumenson is also the author of The Patton Papers.
Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir
Madeleine K. Albright - 2020
“I don’t want to be remembered,” she answered. “I am still here and have much more I intend to do. As difficult as it might seem, I want every stage of my life to be more exciting than the last.”In that time of transition, the former Secretary considered the possibilities: she could write, teach, travel, give speeches, start a business, fight for democracy, help to empower women, campaign for favored political candidates, spend more time with her grandchildren. Instead of choosing one or two, she decided to do it all. For nearly twenty years, Albright has been in constant motion, navigating half a dozen professions, clashing with presidents and prime ministers, learning every day.Hell and Other Destinations reveals this Albright at her bluntest, funniest, most intimate, and most serious. It is the tale of our times anchored in lessons for all time, narrated by an extraordinary woman with a matchless zest for life.
Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
John Matteson - 2007
Yet during Louisa's youth, the famous Alcott was her father, Bronson—an eminent teacher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He desired perfection, for the world and from his family. Louisa challenged him with her mercurial moods and yearnings for money and fame. The other prize she deeply coveted—her father's understanding—seemed hardest to win. This story of Bronson and Louisa's tense yet loving relationship adds dimensions to Louisa's life, her work, and the relationships of fathers and daughters.
The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency
James Tobin - 2013
In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. “He’s through,” said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man, as they and the nation would learn in time.With a painstaking reexamination of original documents, James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelt’s fateful partnership with his wife, Eleanor; and he shows that FDR’s true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the crippled. Tobin also explodes the conventional wisdom of recent years—that FDR deceived the public about his condition. In fact, Roosevelt and his chief aide, Louis Howe, understood that only by displaying himself as a man who had come back from a knockout punch could FDR erase the perception that had followed him from childhood—that he was a pampered, too smooth pretty boy without the strength to lead the nation. As Tobin persuasively argues, FDR became president less in spite of polio than because of polio.The Man He Became affirms that true character emerges only in crisis and that in the shaping of this great American leader character was all.
The Allies: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II
Winston Groom - 2018
Vastly different in upbringing and political beliefs, they were not always in agreement--or even on good terms. But, often led by Churchill's enduring spirit, in the end these three men changed the course of history. Using the remarkable letters between the three world leaders, enriching narrative details of their personal lives, and riveting tales of battles won and lost, best-selling historian Winston Groom returns to share one of the biggest stories of the 20th century: The interwoven and remarkable tale, and a fascinating study of leadership styles, of three world leaders who fought the largest war in history.
The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents
William DeGregorio - 1984
A factual look at all our chief executives, from George Washington to our current president.
President Nixon: Alone in the White House
Richard Reeves - 2001
Using thousands of new interviews and recently discovered or declassified documents and tapes, Richard Reeves's President Nixon offers a surprising portrait of a brilliant and contradictory man. Even as he dreamed of presidential greatness, Nixon could trust no one. His closest aides spied on him as he spied on them, while cabinet members, generals, and admirals spied on all of them -- rifling briefcases and desks, tapping each other's phones in a house where no one knew what was true anymore. Reeves shows a presidency doomed from the start by paranoia and corruption, beginning with Nixon and Kissinger using the CIA to cover up a murder by American soldiers in Vietnam that led to the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers, then to secret counterintelligence units within the White House itself, and finally to the burglaries and cover-up that came to be known as Watergate. President Nixon is the astonishing story of a complex political animal who was as praised as he was reviled and who remains a subject of controversy to this day.
A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan
Michael K. Deaver - 2001
Reagan was once asked if he thought of me as another son. He thought a minute and said, 'Son, no. Brother, maybe.'"A warm, personal portrait of Ronald Reagan, A Different Drummer brims with recollections from a relationship that has spanned more than three decades. Former aide and longtime family friend, Michael Deaver first met Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for governor of California and later served him in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as the president's deputy chief of staff. Whether it was traveling with Reagan on endless campaign flights, discussing the day-to-day issues in the Oval Office, or surviving the harrowing assassination attempt, Deaver worked with the former chief executive for twenty consecutive years. Now he offers his memories of Ronald Reagan as governor, president, and friend.In 1964, after Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful bid for the presidency, the Republican Party found itself in disarray, and Michael Deaver, a young party operative, a "red meat conservative," was looking for a new party leader he could believe in. He threw his hat in with a former actor and General Electric spokesperson, a man who would later prove himself capable of joining the disparate elements of the Party and securing the nomination. In what would be the first of many underestimations, the Democratic Party eagerly takes on Reagan. He would not only go on to win the governorship of California, but he would serve two terms. In 1976 he was unable to unseat President Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination but, undeterred, he returned in 1980 and won a landslide victory, leading America to remarkable heights of prosperity and confidence.Yet as one of the most successful and popular presidents in American history, Reagan remains a mystery even to biographers with total access. In A Different Drummer, Deaver writes of the Reagan he has known: a man who was shy and deplored talking about himself, who would rather spend a party talking to a laborer than policy wonks; a man whose convictions remained unchanged over the course of his life, who never used pollsters to decide his position on issues; a man whose idea of relaxation was riding a horse, fixing fence posts, and chopping wood until his muscles ached and his hands blistered. Reagan emerges in this impressionistic portrait as charismatic and unwaveringly optimistic, a devoted husband and dedicated leader, disciplined and tough. As Deaver points out in his introduction, "He worked eight years doing the toughest job on earth; crisscrossed the world; and survived an assassin's bullet, a devastating riding accident, cancer, and brain surgery all after he turned seventy."Writing not only of their dizzying highs, Deaver also shares the lows, including the tough times that would test the strength of their friendship. Finally, he shares a poignant look at Reagan today as he battles Alzheimer's disease. It is Nancy Reagan's "finest hour," Deaver writes, a validation of the greatest love story he has ever known.With anecdotes that are insightful, entertaining, intimate, and surprising, A Different Drummer sheds remarkable new light on an American icon admired by many and understood by few.
George Washington: Gentleman Warrior
Stephen Brumwell - 2012
The book focuses on a side of Washington that is often overlooked: the feisty young frontier officer and the early career of the tough forty-something commander of the revolutionaries' ragtag Continental Army.Award-winning historian Stephen Brumwell shows how, ironically, Washington's reliance upon English models of "gentlemanly" conduct, and on British military organization, was crucial in establishing his leadership of the fledgling Continental Army, and in forging it into the weapon that secured American independence. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including original archival research, Brumwell brings a fresh new perspective on this extraordinary individual, whose fusion of gentleman and warrior left an indelible imprint on history.
The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower's Faith
Alan Sears - 2019
Eisenhower that focus on his military career or the time of his presidency, none clearly explores the important role faith played both in his personal life and in his public policy. This despite the fact that he is the only US president to be baptized as a Christian while in office.Alan Sears and Craig Osten invite you on a journey that is unique in American history and is essential to understanding one of the most consequential, admired, and complex Americans of the 20th Century. The story begins in abject poverty in rural Texas, then travels through Kansas, West Point, two World Wars, and down Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the untold story of a man whose growing faith sustained him through the loss of a young son, marital difficulties, depression, career disappointments, and being witness to some of the worst atrocities humankind has devised. A man whose faith was based in his own sincere personal conviction, not out of a sense of political expediency or social obligation.You've met Dwight Eisenhower the soldier and Dwight Eisenhower the president. Now meet Dwight Eisenhower the man of faith.
The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
David Morris Potter - 1976
Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History“The magnum opus of a great American historian.” —NewsweekNow in a new edition for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, David Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of antebellum America offers an indispensible analysis of the causes of the war between the states. The Journal of Southern History calls Potter’s incisive account, “modern scholarship’s most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War,” and the New York Times Book Review hails it as “profound and original…. History in the grand tradition.”