Franklin D. Roosevelt
The War Years, 1939-1945
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Having guided the nation through the worst economic crisis in its history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt by 1939 was turning his attention to a world on the brink of war. The second part of Roger Daniels’s biography focuses on FDR’s growing mastery in foreign affairs. Relying on FDR’s own words to the American people and eyewitness accounts of the man and his accomplishments, Daniels reveals a chief executive orchestrating an immense wartime effort. Roosevelt had effective command of military and diplomatic information and unprecedented power over strategic military and diplomatic affairs. He simultaneously created an arsenal of democracy that armed the Allies while inventing the United Nations intended to ensure a lasting postwar peace. FDR achieved these aims while expanding general prosperity, limiting inflation, and continuing liberal reform despite an increasingly conservative and often hostile Congress. Although fate robbed him of the chance to see the victory he had never doubted, events in 1944 assured him that the victory he had done so much to bring about would not be long delayed. A compelling reconsideration of Roosevelt the president and campaigner, The War Years, 1939-1945 provides new views and vivid insights about a towering figure--and six years that changed the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This dry academic biography of F.D.R. (the first of two planned volumes) will have limited appeal for lay readers. Daniels (Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II), a history professor at the University of Cincinnati, differentiates his approach from the legion of other F.D.R. biographers by "pay more attention to Roosevelt's speeches than his other biographers had," and making extensive use of New York Times coverage of his subject his review of which found "hundreds of examples of otherwise unrecorded and obscure examples of formal, semiformal, and reactive utterances by Roosevelt." There are sections that will interest non-experts, as in Daniels's analysis of how F.D.R.'s tenure as governor of New York set him in good stead for his tenure as president. Still, despite the book's length and its granular examination of F.D.R.'s policies, some readers will be frustrated by the offhand treatment of some major events, including Roosevelt's first race for the White House and the near-successful attempt on his life in 1933. Daniels is at least consistent in addressing his stated purpose of explaining what F.D.R. "did and what he hoped would result," rather than expounding upon "why this somewhat coddled son of American gentry became a tribune of the people."
