A vivid and personal portrait of America’s greatest
political family and its enormous impact on our nation—the
companion volume to the seven-part PBS documentary series
With 796 photographs, some never before
seen
The authors of the acclaimed and
best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and
Baseball present an intimate history of three
extraordinary individuals from the same extraordinary
family—Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Geoffrey C. Ward, distilling more than thirty
years of thinking and writing about the Roosevelts, and the
acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns help us understand for the
first time that, despite the fierce partisanship of their
eras, the Roosevelts were far more united than divided.
All the history the Roosevelts made is here, but
this is primarily an intimate account, the story of three
people who overcame obstacles that would have undone less
forceful personalities.
Theodore Roosevelt would
push past childhood frailty, outpace depression, survive
terrible grief—and transform the office of the presidency.
Eleanor Roosevelt, orphaned and alone as a child,
would endure her husband’s betrayal, battle her own
self-doubts, and remake herself into the most consequential
first lady in American history—and the most admired woman on
earth.
And Franklin Roosevelt, born to privilege
and so pampered that most of his youthful contemporaries
dismissed him as a charming lightweight, would summon the
strength to lead the nation through the two greatest crises
since the Civil War, though he could not take a single step
unaided.
The three were towering personalities, but
The Roosevelts shows that they were also flawed human
beings who confronted in their personal lives issues
familiar to all of us: anger and the need for forgiveness,
courage and cowardice, confidence and self-doubt, loyalty to
family and the need to be true to oneself. This is the story
of the Roosevelts—no other American family ever touched so
many lives.