No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt - The Home Front in World War II - Hardcover

Goodwin, Doris Kearns

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671642405 ISBN 13: 9780671642402

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

"No Ordinary Time" is a monumental work, a brilliantly conceived chronicle of one of the most vibrant and revolutionary periods in the history of the United States. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines-- Eleanor and Franklin's marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor's life as First Lady, and FDR's White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.

About this title

Review

"Goodwin has pulled off the double trick of making Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt seem so monumental as to have come from a very distant past, and at the same time so vital as to have been alive only yesterday."

"Engrossing . . . "No Ordinary Time" is no ordinary book. . . . An ambitiously conceived and imaginatively executed participant's eye view of the United States in the war years. . . . The sheer abundance of colorful biographical anecdotes and the cumulative weight of telling detail sustain an atmosphere of immediacy and leave a lastingly vivid impression."

"The Roosevelt marriage is endlessly gripping because it was so consequential. . . . The reader feels like a resident in the White House."

"A tale rendered nearly seamless by Goodwin's skills as a reporter and writer, and by the immense entanglement of her subjects' private and public lives. How their talents, insecurities, and demons impacted on the country and the world will be much better understood with the publication of this remarkable book."

"A thoroughly terrific and important work, a valuable addition to Roosevelt literature. . . . Goodwin has deftly reminded us just how extraordinary FDR and Eleanor were in 'no ordinary times.'"

About the Author

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I trace my love of history to the days when I was six years old and my father taught me the mysterious art of keeping score at baseball games so that I could listen to the Dodgers play in the afternoons while he was at work and re-create for him at night the entire history of each day's game, play by play, inning by inning. He made it even more special for me because he never told me that all this was described in the newspapers the next day so that I thought without me he would never even know what happened to our beloved Dodgers! Thus history acquired for me a magic that it still holds to this day.

But if my love of history was planted in that childhood experience, my particular style of writing--a love of storytelling and an attempt to fuse history and biography with as much detail as possible so that the characters can come alive for the reader-is rooted in the experience of knowing one president Lyndon Johnson-very well when I was only thirty four. I worked for him first as a White House Fellow in his last year in office and then helped him on his memoirs the last four years of his life. It should have been a time in his life when he had much to be grateful for. His career in politics had, after all, reached a peak with his election to the presidency and he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity. But here was a man whose entire life had been consumed by power, success, and ambition, and as a result, he could barely get through the days once the presidency was gone. And, in his vulnerable state, he opened up to me in ways he never would have, had I known him at the height of his power, telling me of his fears, his nightmares, and his sorrows.

It was this experience that fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public image that I'd like to believe I have brought to each of my books, beginning with Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, published in 1976 when I was still teaching at Harvard where I had gotten my Ph.D. in 1968. Watching Johnson's desolation at the end of his life also had an impact on my personal life. I had started my second book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, shortly after I was married and had two sons in two years. I was still a professor at Harvard, trying to teach, write, and be a mother at the same time and doing nothing right. The image of Johnson's sad retirement helped me to make some choices-to give up teaching so that I could stay at home with my children and write. Even then, it took ten years to write the Kennedy book, which was finally published in 1987. But when I look at the young men my boys have become, I have never regretted the years I spent at home. I was drawn to my third book, No Ordinary Time, by a fascination both with the period of time, a time when our country was united by a common cause against a common enemy, and by a fascination with the extraordinary partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The research was a labor of love: I spent months at a time at Hyde Park, New York, conducted hundreds of interviews with people who knew the Roosevelts personally, perused dozens of diaries and thousands of letters, read old newspapers and magazines, and truly felt as if I had been transported back 50 years in time.

OTHER WORKS BY DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN:

• Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

• The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys

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Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0671642405
• ISBN 13: 9780671642402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 759