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 ...

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 ...

(“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 ...

In the skillful writing of biographer Nigel Hamilton, history is a living thing, something you can see and hear, reach out and touch. History has an immediacy for him that has come to life in more ...

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 ...