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 ...

Picture an annoying boss. The virtually invisible chief executive who can’t be bothered to meet with the little people. The dogmatic supervisor who clings to a crackpot idea that clearly isn’t working ...

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 ...

As scholars compare President Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, a timely new biography by former Washington Post reporter Kirstin Downey reminds us that history often overlooks those who do the ...

(“FDR” by Jean Edward Smith, Random House, 858 pages, $35). In January 1943, after meeting with Franklin Roosevelt at Casablanca on the African coast to plot future military operations during the ...

“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 ...

Last month, President-elect Barack Obama roused book publishers from their recession-induced torpor by mentioning in a TV interview that he was reading a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first ...