Charles Wheeler
The American Engima
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
By Conrad Black
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1280pp £30 order from our bookshop
That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt
By Robert H Jackson
Oxford University Press 290pp £20 order from our bookshop
IN A PREFACE to this monumental biography Conrad Black pays tribute to his publisher's editor, William Whitworth. Their dealings, he tells us, were often abrasive, and conducted entirely by e-mail. He hopes that their intense relationship will eventually lead to an actual meeting. Intriguing. I wonder whether a hard-pressed Whitworth might have suggested cuts. If so, he was overruled. Black's opus is defiantly, self-indulgently long, and for the most part a painstaking recital of facts, culled from the record of a period the author is not old enough to remember.
Not that his life of Roosevelt is without merit. Speed through the first 400 pages, which cover acres of well-trodden ground in excruciating detail. and you'll reach the heart of the matter: Roosevelt's struggle with America's isolationists, his blatant evasion of the neutrality laws and his creative if erratic relationship
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/