After a failed attempt to read "Naked Lunch" I turned to this book to gain some insight into William Burroughs that might aid me with future reading. I did not find that the book went into great detail about Burroughs ideas, except for ones that I find either trivial or even "wacky", like his interest in some aspects of Scientology and Reich's "Orgone Box". In fact, I might have given up on my plans of reading Burroughs after reading this biography; I could have easily concluded that Burroughs was a man who had led an interesting, albeit tragic, life but who, because of his heroin use and open homosexuality, had just become a "trendy" author. I might have concluded that he was a precursor to the cultural revolution of the 60s but of little importance today. Quite frankly I persist in my quest of getting to know Burroughs because of the importance attributed to him by one of my favorite philosophers, Gilles Deleuze, who claims that Burroughs has a lot to teach us about the "society of control". Only my future readings of Burroughs' novels will reveal rather I am right to persist in my study of him.

If this book failed in being an intellectual biography, it certainly succeeded in portraying the world of William Burroughs in an interesting fashion. Burroughs life seems for the most part
a series of tragedies. It appears as though he was molested as a youth and one is tempted - perhaps due to the saturation of "pop psychology" in our day- to conclude that somehow his future misfortunes (and brilliance) were rooted in that event. Subsequently driven from the United States, then Mexico (where he committed the infamous "William Tell" fatal shooing of his wife) he spends the greater part of his life wandering between Tangiers, Paris, London and New York. Oddly enough, he only seems to find some kind ofhappiness at the end of his life in Lawrence, Kansas.

His meeting with the other members of the "Beat Movement", Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, seemed fated, and unlike the others he did not become a "Beat Stereotype but remained authentically himself, behaving in many ways like a conservative midwesterner. Perhaps this authenticity is what appealed to his groupies who could not manage to retain their own identity separate from the various trends in which they participated.

Whether I will find anything intellectually stimulating in the works of Burroughs remains to be seen. Despite his many shortcoming, he was a key cultural force in undermining the foundation of the narrow, cocktail sipping, coutnry club 50s generation.

When I read this book in 1990, or thereabouts, I had only read William Burroughs' book Junky, and I had read nothing by Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg.

After I finished reading Literary Outlaw, by Ted Morgan, I was so fascinated that I read all of Burroughs' novels, and several books by Kerouac and Ginsberg. I also read two more Burroughs biographies, just to get more information on this weird old guy.

Literary Outlaw is just that good.

There are newer biographies of Burroughs by Barry Miles and also Graham Caveney. Nevertheless, Literary Outlaw remains the definitive Burroughs biography written to date.

This is a fascinating biography that reads like a pageturning novel. Burroughs grew up in a privileged St. Louis family, spent some time at a rough ranch-style boarding school in New Mexico, attended Harvard, travelled in Europe, and lived in New York, Mexico, New Orleans, Texas, Tangier, London, New York (again), and finally Kansas. Along the way he became the most scandalous figure in modern letters. His adventures and misadventures are related in this marvelous book.

Literary Outlaw is more exhaustive than either Caveney's or Miles' biographies. Chapters with titles like "Tangier: 1954-1958" and "The London Years: 1966-1973" make for easy navigation. As the book's coverage ends in 1988, there is no information on Burroughs' life in the 1990s, but the essays in the book Word Virus (by James Grauerholz) act as a good supplement, for biographical information.

Morgan did a good job. He wrote a page-turning biography, but not at the expense of Burroughs' literary reputation. Burroughs' value as a writer is challenged throughout, and it holds up. Biographical detail is linked to popular criticism of the texts. There is an extensive section of notes. There is an index.

You can't go wrong with this biography. If you've never read a biography of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg, I advise you to try Literary Outlaw. This book is very well written, and is probably the most fascinating biography I have ever read.

ken32

The only book of, or by, William Burroughs that I have read twice. His life was stranger than his fiction.

Ted Morgan's "Wilderness at Dawn" is one of the best of a crop of North American colonial histories published since 1990. Rather than a comprehensive history, it is a series of incidents that add up to a very readable whole. Morgan begins with pre-Columbian history and goes on to relate the experiences of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and various flavors of English colonies. One of my favorite stories is how the godly Pilgrims found themselves neighbors to a riotous colony led by one Thomas Morton. Before Miles Standish put their rivals out of business, Morton's drunken crew traded guns and booze to the Indians in exchange for beaver pelts and sexual favors. Anyone who believes history is boring has not read Ted Morgan's and other recent works about the American colonies. The last section of this book addresses the problems of post-Revolutionary War colonization, including chapters about the appalling dangers of trans-Appalachian settlement and about how the Old Northwest was surveyed.

Ted Morgan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from New York City, who has written biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sir Winston Churchill, and Somerset Maughan, organizes his "story of an empty continent filling with people" (p. 11) by the usual chronological structure (from ca. 1490 to the early 1800s). Yet his frontier approach is quite fragmented, and therefore very realistic. He includes the Spanish presence, the French, Jamestown, Pilgrim, Dutch, Puritan, Manorial, Chesapeake, Black, Salzburger, and Quaker frontiers. His careful distinction between pilgrim and puritan is to be applauded, and his viewing the Virginia tobacco planters (Manorial), the Charlestown rice culture (Black), and Austrian Lutherans in Georgia (Salzburger) as their own "frontier" gives an important geographical specificity to the peculiar characteristics of the various areas of settlement. Of note is Morgan's interweaving native interaction with the Europeans. This he does frequently, so a separate chapter about any Indian counter frontier is unnecessary. However, the idea of a moving "frontier" against an established Indian presence does belie the Eurocentric perspective of the author. WILDERNESS AT DAWN is chocked full of compelling stories of "known" and "unknown" players in the American drama. These stories cover a broad gamut of human experience. In essence, nothing is left untouched, and the verisimilitude simply oozes forth from the narrative. The story flows beautifully while the veracity of the events is not at all compromised. Ample anecdotes from diaries, monographs, and public records move the reader through gripping eyewitness accounts. While the lack of footnotes might frustrate the technical historian, such certainly enhances the readibility of the book, especially as story. Primary and secondary sources for each chapter are listed appropriately at the end of the book. Worthy of special mention are Morgan's excellent brief broad syntheses--sometimes historical, sometimes geographical, sometimes a mixture of both. One excellent example is the importance of Pope's rebellion in the present Southwest as illustrative of geograpical persistence, i.e., the Indians could not completely purge Spanish influence, as they were "Hispanicized beyond return" and had become "irretrievably hybrid" (p. 216). While some generalizations in the narrative do exist, Morgan is not prone to such as his rich details about people, places, and events paints a full, realistic portrait. On the deficit side, however, is his unfortunate rehashing of the Bering Strait origin myth (chapter one), without any reference to alternative explanations from Indian traditions. Otherwise, the book is really a mine of excellent information. These are stories to be passed on. They are worth the telling and worthy of hearing. Maps in the work are good, but sparse, as there are only eight. More would be better. The only illustrations are black and white, and they depict relevant art, relics, photos, letters, documents, quotes, etc. at the beginning of each chapter. Notes are provided at the end as well as a fine index. In summary, while the critical revisionist scholar might bewail Morgan for his portrayal of a different America, and charge him as guilty of a gullible swallowing of Turner's "frontierism", the reality of America as "no one's clone" and as "self-invented, sui generis, underivative and wholly original" (p. 492), in the mind of this reviewer, remains valid and intact. "America was a smoking test tube, a braying infant, a blank page; it was change made palpable, change glorified, change as a stated goal, fluid, undetermined, unfixed, defying the logic of the centuries, observing its distant horizon lines, a ship that had strayed from the fleet and was off on its own uncharter course" (p. 493).

Breathtaking approach to a well known subject. History from the people's viewpoint. No dull dates, battles, generals, presidents; but living, breathing stories by and of the most unique and most common. Must also read Shovel of Stars, the sequel (also 10)

What a wonderful book this is! I love W. S. Maugham. I first read his short stories in college and "Home" has never left me. Maugham's words are a great comfort to me and this biography about his life and his experiences are absolutely fascinating! Reading biographies is a hobby of mine, sometimes I do not get passed page 30 due to the horrible boring words of the biographers, but this book is an absolute delight. It is a must read for ALL Maugham lovers.

"Maugham" remains the quintessential biography of this enigmatic figure. The most complete and thorough examination of the life and tramas and adventures that made up the life of the man and the writer. As Morgan states, Maugham is the most popular writer of serious fiction that England has produced since Charles Dickens. Weather that fiction is literature or not remains to be seen by his fans and by his critics the discussion has been put aside forever. Somerset Maugham is barley mentioned in acadamia. But Maugham had a genius for story telling (Max Beerbohm) and he told more than two hundred of them in his plays, novels, essays and most admirably in his short stories. As Alexander Freere said, I you don't think he can write, read "The Outstation" or "The Alien Corn" and then sit down and write a better one. His barroom fight scene in "The Moon and Sixpense" is superior to anything by Hemmingway and it was written six years before "The Nick Adams Stories" or The Torrents of Spring" were published. Maugham's story is so fantastic that it is no wonder he was such a good friend of Churchill's. Churchill, of course had an equally eventfull life. Maugham was as famous a playwright in the teens and the twenties as Neil Simon, but he was also a Doctor an ambulance driver on the Western Front and a spy who was given the assignment to try to squelch the Bolshevik Revolution. All in a twenty year span during which he wrote ten unsuccessful novels and "Of Human Bondage". He was also the first great world traveller author with the possible exception of Conrad. Maugham went nearly everywhere one could expect to travel during the days of World Wars and steamships. He wrote about his travels in short stories that are still widely read by many of my fellow travellers along with the first guru tripping novel,"The Razor's Edge." Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque on the French Riveria was the place he entertained royally. He was a great instructor to his chef and an innovator of cuisine. He was at various times friends with Henry James, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Noel Coward and Graham Greene, but the reason this book influenced me more than any book I have ever read is the additional cast of characters that I was unaware of before reading Morgan's book. Writers like; Arnold Bennett, Lytton Strachey, Aubrey Beardsley, Ruppert Brook and scores of other people whose work I am now familiar with because of this biography. This book has been critized by many fans for being too rough on the writer. Labeling Maugham a women hater, cheap, anti semetic, cynical, bitter at being considered a second rater and a promiscuous Bi-sexual who became exclusively homosexual after the age of forty to almost a pornographic obsession. In other words, only being able to enjoy anonymous encounters. All this criticism is unfounded. Morgan paints a sympathetic balanced portrait of a painfully sensitive human being who lived through a time that is difficult to judge. I can count myself as Somerset Maugham's biggest fan and I love women. I have travelled to many Maugham spots on the globe: Tahiti, Capri, Trivandrum, Pagan and Haiphong. I even visited his home in South Carolina and his writers cabin. This is a Great Book.

As Helene Hanff says in 84 Charing Cross Road, "I'm a great lover of I-was-there books." The Duc de Saint-Simon was certainly there, and, even better, was a witty and insightful racountier. As a courtier at the Sun King's court, he knew all the behind-the-drapes gossip, as well as having a keen understanding of such important figures of the day such as Louis XIV, Mme. de Maintenon, and James II. In addition, as with any great diarist, the more we read his writings, the more we enjoy the company of the Duc. This is an excellent introductory selection from his multi-volume diaries; it tends to emphasize the absurd, scatological, and scandalous episodes of court life. (Once you've read the story of the noblewoman who habitually took an enema in the presence of the king, I am sure you will see what I mean!) Those who enjoy this book can go on to the full "Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon," which was, by the way, among Helene Hanff's favorites.

The only word forthis book is OPULENT.Imagine a book whose subject is the first half of the cold war.Now imagine that it reads like a novel, has a cast of characters any Hollywood producer would drool over, is informed by enough primary research to supply a shelf of books, brims with enough ORIGINAL, never published archival revelations to keep twenty academics in grants for a decade.Furthermore, imagine that it approaches it's highly politicized subject with no axe to grind, no kowtowing to this pundit or that one, and is primarily driven by the twin ideals of NARRATIVE and RESEARCH. That's what this is. What a read! Is bound to draw the ire of mousier historians who will resent it's independence from a whole industry of secondary sources. This is the Iliad of the Cold War, not some bundle of commentary.

I have never read a book by Ted Morgan (or his previous incarnation as Sacha de Gramont - note the anagram!) that was not well-written, entertaining and highly informative. He writes about a very wide range of topics and it seems to be impossible to guess what his next work will deal with. This excellent book describes the process whereby the areas west of the Appalacians that became United States post-1800 were initially acquired, how they were incorporated as Territories and finally, how they achieved full statehood. The sequence would be interesting, but presumably familiar, for most US citizens, but for the non-North American the story is totally fascinating. Morgan does not just deal with the official governmental processes but also with the human and sociological aspects of the settlement and development of these vast areas. He intertwines a huge number of personal reminiscences - ranging from the heroic to the tawdry, from the tragic to the hilarious, from the inspiring to the outright indecent - into his narrative, such that it the story comes alive. Having read the book right through once with great pleasure, I find it afterwards to be a splendid tome to dip into at spare moments. It's an excellent bedside companion or a gift for a historically-oriented friend. Practically every page is a delight.

If you are at all interested, no matter how little, in the situation of France and her citizens during wwII then you must read this book! No author i have read has been able to convey so clearly, the emotions of this dramatic period. from the fumbling government ministers to the death defying resitance members, Morgan is able to capture the desperation of the moment. so many books focus on either the top level of decision makers or the common citizens experience, Morgan provides insight into both realms with clarity, irony and sometimes even humor.

This light-hearted venture into the world of Bernie Rhodenbarr, burglar extraordinaire and bookstore owner contains much of the sharp, witty dialogue of the previous books in the series only sharper and wittier. The discussion between Bernie and Carolyn over the sexual preference of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone is priceless. This is a sometimes-confusing mystery involving a series of events that sees Bernie burgle an apartment, return the booty and then re-enter the place to plant evidence after finding a corpse in the bathroom. Bernie sets out to work out who committed the murder, plus who committed a burglary that he's been mistakenly charged with. This is a most entertaining mystery that continues to keep you thinking, while providing plenty of smiles along the way.

Lawrence Block is one of our most talented mystery authors. In the Bernie Rhodenbarr series he explores how an ordinary, but intelligent, "honest" person might go about pursuing a life of crime as a fastidious and talented burglar who isn't proud of what he does, doesn't like to hang out with criminals, and really gets a big thrill out of breaking and entering . . . and removing valuables. As you can see, there's a sitcom set-up to provide lots of humor. But the humor works well in part because Mr. Block is able to put the reader in the Bernie's shoes while he breaks, enters and steals . . . and evades the long arm of the law. To balance the "honest" burglar is an array of "dishonest" and equally easy-money loving cops. As a result, you're in a funny moral never-never land while your stomach tightens and your arm muscles twitch as tension builds. To make matters even more topsy-turvy, Bernie at some point in every story turns into an investigator who must figure out "who-dun-it" for some crime that he personally didn't do. It's almost like one of those "mystery at home" games where the victim comes back as the police investigator, playing two roles. Very nice!

So much for explaining the concept of the series. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams is the sixth book in the series. I strongly suggest that you begin the series by reading Burglars Can't Be Choosers and follow it up with The Burglar in the Closet, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, and The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian. Each story in the series adds information and characters in a way that will reduce your pleasure of the others if read out of order. Although, I originally read them out of order and liked them well enough. I'm rereading them now in order, and like it much better this way. The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart comes next in the series.

As this book opens, Bernie has been going straight . . . for almost a year. Barnegat Books, a used hard cover book store he owns and operates, has been providing his living rather than burglary. Then, he receives a double shock. His new landlord is Bordon Stoppelgard, and with his 30 year lease at an end, Mr. Stoppelgard announces that the new lease will be for $10,500 a month rather than $875. How can Bernie afford that? He can't. Then, Stoppelgard comes into Barnegat Books to buy a first edition of Sue Grafton's "B" Is for Burglar for $80 plus tax. Bernie tries to refuse him the sale, but Stoppelgard insists, slapping a hundred-dollar bill on the counter. Then he laughs at Bernie for selling a five-hundred-dollar book for so little.

But Bernie's sorely tempted to burgle again . . . both for the money and the thrills he gets from burglary. That temptation is particularly great just now because Bernie knows that the wealthy Martin Gilmartins will be out for the evening. Bernie does his best to avoid temptation . . . and succeeds. His only slip is to call Mr. Gilmartin from Carolyn Kaiser's apartment to ask him how he liked the show . . . a call that can be traced by the police when Mr. Gilmartin discovers a burglary has been committed and valuable baseball cards are missing. Bernie's alibi isn't very good because he decides to go out after leaving Carolyn. Someone might think he was visiting a fence to sell the baseball cards. What to do?

Most people will find The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams to be the very best book in the series. The plot is deliciously complicated and unusual. There are mysteries galore to solve, and it's not clear until near the end who did what to whom. The satirical references to mystery novels and novelists are priceless (these include wickedly twisted misstatements of Sue Grafton titles and stories, and a hilarious sequence about cats solving mysteries referring to the Lillian Jackson Braun books). The book also introduces Raffles, Bernie?s new mouse-exterminating-assistant cat who is always on the paper chase, and Carolyn's offbeat theories about women and cats. The baseball card trivia about the Chalmers Mustard Ted Williams set will delight any collector or fan. The comic sequences had me laughing out loud as Bernie finds unexpected surprises as he employs his burglary talents. Bernie also discovers a new source of income which most readers would not have anticipated. Some of the new characters will also amuse or delight you, even though they are only in this book. In essence, there's enough good material in this book for four excellent novels. And it's all nicely pulled together.

How will Bernie save the store? Who took the baseball cards? How will Bernie solve the other puzzles in the book? You are making a big mistake if you don't read this book!

The theme of this book is whether honesty or dishonesty pays better . . . and why. Where do you see dishonest people doing better than honest ones now? Will that continue? Why or why not?

Donald Mitchell
Co-author of The 2,000 Percent Solution, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Given the Splendid Splinter's recent death, I couldn't resist this title, and in the process, I discovered that Lawrence Block is one of the more clever authors of this day. Our hero is a used book seller and a part time burglar, who tends to use his skills for good rather than evil. One minor complaint is we are often led down a path, only to be filled in later by Bernie the burglar of a fact he had been withholding the reader for a few chapters. But all in all, this light hearted book is fun, and easily readable. I plan to try out more of Mr Block's works.

This book has wonderful photos of every type of weather from clouds, sun dogs, rainbows, hail, freezing rain, and on and on. Each description is only a page long and includes a photograph. It's easy to understand and doesn't get into too much detail. My 6 year old, although she didn't understand the text, got this book out of the library and liked it so much she wanted a copy of her own -- she loved looking at the different photos. And as an adult, I had to agree with her, it's great just to thumb through as well as read the specifics.

It has been said "people complain about the weather but never do anything about it." Perhaps that's because they don't know much about it. This book will help you learn more about our weather. I was looking for a book that explained about various weather phenomenon and came across it. I loved it not only because of the pictures and descriptions in the last chapter on various weather types (different kinds of fogs, clouds, storms, precipitation, optical effects, etc), but also for lost of other information covered in the book, but also because the book's other chapters also contained so much excellent information. Subjects like Understanding the Weather (which covers the atmosphere, sources of weather, global wind patterns and different kinds of winds, frontal systems, etc.), Forecasting the Weather (obviously that has never been an exact science!), Changing the Weather, and also a secion on different climates and how humankind and animals adapt.

There are lots of pictures and diagrams in this book which help to explain key weather concepts. One day I will force myself to read this book cover to cover instead of getting sidetracked at all the gorgeous illustrations and pictures in this book, every time I pick it up to read it.

I love this book all about weather, how it occurs, what makes our planet hum. It has helped me read the sky far more clearly & understand daily forecasts. It is filled with gorgeous photographs & easily interpreted diagrams. I never knew there were so many forms of fog!

It's tempting to say that no biography of FDR can be boring, given his extraordinary life and the length of time he served as President. Ted Morgan's "FDR" has lots going for it: it's a single volume biography (admittedly long); and it's no hagiography in that FDR's failings, both as a politician and human being, are not glossed over.

But, I found that "FDR" had significant faults which marred my enjoyment of it somewhat. It purported to be a serious biography and indeed for much of the time, that's how it read, but Morgan had too much of a prediliction for lapsing into anecdotes and folksy stories, thereby sending the book down unnecessary side alleys. In all, there was too much of that and too little serious analysis: it's almost extraordinary that no attempt was made to do an inquest on the New Deal. Space might have been a problem, but surely an evaluation of FDR's Presidency requires this?

At times, Morgan is just clumsy. In 1925, FDR invited helped some fellow polio victims staying at Warm Springs. Morgan summed it up:

"It felt good to be in command of something again, even if was only half a dozen cripples."

Writing with all the subtlety of a train crash. Surely, by that analysis FDR himself was "only a cripple"?

Not a horribly bad piece of work, but could have been far better.

G Rodgers

When historians are asked to rank our greatest Presidents, three men nearly always fill the top 3 positions: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although FDR, who served from 1933-1945, is by far the most recent of our truly "great" Presidents, he has become an oddly forgotten figure by many Americans, and lesser Presidents such as Harry Truman and John F Kennedy have captured the public's imagination. Yet Roosevelt accomplished far more than any of his successors, and he has the distinction of leading America through two of the worst crises in its' history: the Great Depression and World War Two. In some ways this may account for FDR's strange obscurity in today's politics and historical memory, for like Lincoln and Washington, FDR's achievements are so great that he doesn't seem as "human" as leaders such as Truman, nor as dramatic and tragic as a Kennedy. In this thoroughly engrossing biography, Ted Morgan brings us not the larger-than-life FDR of myth, but a fully human, "warts-and-all" look at our longest-serving Chief Executive. Morgan vividly brings to life the priviliged world that FDR grew up in, and offers marvelous anecdotes and portraits of FDR and the people in his life that brings the man and his era alive in a way that no other FDR biography even approaches. While other historians may offer a more fact-filled and event-oriented approach, many of their books (such as Frank Freidel's biography) are often dry and fail to grasp why FDR was so popular with the public or why he became such a dominant political figure. Morgan includes most of the great events of Roosevelt's life - his fight against polio, the years as Governor of New York, the New Deal, his leadership in World War Two - but he also mentions little details and stories that illustrate the impact he had on ordinary people's lives during the Depression, and shows how even his personal flaws (such as his endless capacity for telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, even if he had no intention of meeting their requests) were actually political strengths. Morgan doesn't shy away from the dark sides of FDR's life and career that many of his other biographers refuse to mention. Among these are his long love affair with Lucy Mercer, which nearly ended his marriage to his distant cousin Eleanor; his involvement in a sordid sex scandal involving using US Navy sailors to catch a homosexual Episcopalian priest, which FDR approved as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then lied about his involvement when the scheme was discovered and came under criticism; his habit of lying, even to his closest friends and advisors; and his general lack of parenting skills with his children. But Morgan also includes the more positive aspects of FDR's personality - the sympathy for the underdog; the genuine concern to help the less-fortunate in our society; the ability to innovate, try out new ideas and programs, and the ability to radiate confidence and optimism to a nation that sorely needed both traits in the dark days of the Depression and World War, all these and more are described by Morgan. If you want a straightforward, chronological account of FDR's Presidency, then there are other books which will offer you the basics of FDR's political career. But if you want to understand FDR as a person and human being, as well as a great political leader, then this book is by far your best choice. For its' ability to offer a portrait of a President that literally gives you the feeling that you "knew" the man personally, Ted Morgan's "FDR" is without peer...an excellent read for any US history or political buff!

FDR is a frustrating figure, in my opinion, because he was so big, and so transformative a leader (to pin James MacGregor Burns's taxonomy of leadership onto him) that every other biography of him I have seen has become reduced to simply the author's bias and idiosyncratic interpretation of him. Some little twerp laboring over a PhD thesis for 10 years gives us a whole book on FDR and the Supreme Court, or FDR and public works, or FDR and WW II. Boring.

Which is where this one comes in. I bought it more than 15 years ago, but never really read it until last year. Before then, I was only interested in "proof texting" FDR to basically show what a socialist bad guy he was, a poor comparative reflection of cousin Theodore. In this sense, too-high a view of Theodore dooms FDR to second-best. Then I read Churchill's 6 Vol. history of WW II, and through that lens saw a very compelling FDR, one big enough to "run" Churchill. And Churchill makes it clear in his history why it was utterly impossible for the West to save Eastern and Central Europe from the Russians. Explaining this take on things drops the charges against FDR so long-brought by the John Birchers--that somehow he gave away the world to the communists.

Ted Morgan gets deep into this, but by way of Roosevelt's childhood and familial relations, focusing on Franklin's impossible mother--the root of his famous evasiveness, says Morgan. Then on into minor politics after a little Harvard; a glimpse of some adultery, and then polio. The adultery is interesting, because compared to someone like Bill Clinton, FDR's sounds quite focused, or even traditional--his Lucy Mercer of Pre-Presidency fame stays in the picture, and is in the room with him 4 terms later when he has his stroke after going thru the morning's mail at the resort in Georgia he had purchased (in pale, or maybe non-pale imitation of Teddie's purchase of the badlands ranch--both places of rehabilitation for each Roosevelt).

And although Eleanor may have played house in a cottage behind Franklin's Mom's ancestral property, with a few lesbian friends, she, too is a sympathetic figure, putting up with Franklin, then becoming his functional nurse, and raising their children in the scant time left after working on the ills of the rest of the world. Something like Hillary with more empathy, or substance. How about Hillary minus the switchblade?

Somewhere in all of the polio and then political battle, FDR decided to be great; and this seems to have translated, as the story unfolds through Morgan, into a similar decision to make the United States great, and dominant. Doing this while paralyzed from the waist down, and while taking time to "stick it" to old foes in the New York State government throughout his presidency, induces a kind of involuntary admiration which lets me see how people like Bill Clinton are so drawn to the FDR memory, and how they seek to replay FDR's utter commitment to the moment and the audience. Compared to a Clinton, the multimillionaire Dutchman from upstate New York paradoxically had a lot less to prove, but yet accomplished so much more.

So after a long time admiring Teddy and dumping on Frank, this book makes it clear to me that although an FDR without the preexisting Teddy would not have been possible, FDR very arguably accomplished a great deal more than TR. As recent, more critical biographers of Teddy explain (H.W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic), Teddy sort of fanatacized-out during his third party phase, maybe paralleling Winston Churchill's father's flame-out--an interesting common point which may have given these two leaders in their wartime phase the ability to compromise and survive, when it would be easier to lecture and purify (and get tossed out).

Thus the connection with the mess of the war, and part of the explanation for us coming out on top (in spite of FDR's child like view of India, and some-said-strange courting of Ibn Saud). If these actions were designed to take adavntage not only of Germany's destruction, but also of England's slide, then FDR succeeded. Maybe Churchill would call him another Marlborough, had he been related, due to this balance of power maneuvering. But maybe FDR didn't intend it that way at all, if he was more a tool of providence mingled in with great effort (kind of an Augustinian view of political success).

In summary, I'm not as hacked off as I used to be when I see FDR's face on our dimes, after reading this book. It's OK with me now if stays right there. He puts a better human face on our money than a stylized Mercury-head yanked from mythology. And that's what this author has also done for me.

One thing I'd like to see a future historian look into: Campobello Island, the family's version of the Kennedy compound, is actually in Canadian territorial water (so I'm told). What relationship did this have to the Roosevelt family import fortune of glass and hardware back in the 1700s and 1800s? Was there a tax avoidance or illegality angle, like the Forbes family, the Bronfmans of Canada (See Peter Newman's book "Bronfman Dynasty" on that), and the Kennedys? That would complete the economic substrate of our knowledge of this family, long since passed, it seems, into fashionable senescense. And sure, all families seem to decline; but few leave behind such great men.

Which gets us back to the pack of FDR authors. They're everywhere, some of their books skinny, some quite fat. But this one really stands out. I highly recommend it.