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I have been intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt since I was a little girl in Sedalia, Missouri, and my mother read me Eleanor's "My Day" columns in the Kansas City Star. Mother would look up and say, "I'm sure she is better than he is," referring, of course, to Eleanor being better than Franklin. My family was rock-ribbed Republican and disapproved of Franklin's policies. I wondered then—and still do—why my mother and other women of her era had so much reverence for Eleanor. I have been looking for the answer ever since.
It presents Eleanor as a passionate woman who drew initial strength from feminist networks as she emerged from a bigoted aristocratic background marked by her unhappy orphaned upbringing and her subordinate role as a wife and mother. First (and the best) of Cook's three volumes of biography on Eleanor, it paints an absorbing picture of the way Eleanor shed Victorian prejudice to become an advocate for social justice.
The first volume in the life of America's greatest First Lady, "a woman who changed the lives of millions" (Washington Post).
Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. Three: 1938-1962, will be published in November 2016.
Eleanor Roosevelt was born into the privileges and prejudices of American aristocracy and into a family ravaged by alcoholism. She overcame debilitating roots: in her public life, fighting against racism and injustice and advancing the rights of women; and in her private life, forming lasting intimate friendships with some of the great men and women of her times. This volume covers ER's family and birth, her childhood, education,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have been intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt since I was a little girl in Sedalia, Missouri, and my mother read me Eleanor's "My Day" columns in the Kansas City Star. Mother would look up and say, "I'm sure she is better than he is," referring, of course, to Eleanor being better than Franklin. My family was rock-ribbed Republican and disapproved of Franklin's policies. I wondered then—and still do—why my mother and other women of her era had so much reverence for Eleanor. I have been looking for the answer ever since.
This book brings to life Eleanor's remarkable accomplishment at the United Nations in 1948 when she shepherded the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a dissenting vote. Describes the importance of this declaration as the primary instrument for the human rights movement today and argues there is much to learn from Eleanor's effort that incorporated both liberty and social responsibility in one of the world's most important documents.
FINALIST FOR THE ROBERT F. KENNEDY BOOK AWARD • “An important, potentially galvanizing book, and in this frightful, ferocious time, marked by war and agony, it is urgent reading.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, Los Angeles Times
Unafraid to speak her mind and famously tenacious in her convictions, Eleanor Roosevelt was still mourning the death of FDR when she was asked by President Truman to lead a controversial commission, under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations, to forge the world’s first international bill of rights.
A World Made New is the dramatic and inspiring story of the remarkable group of men…
I have been intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt since I was a little girl in Sedalia, Missouri, and my mother read me Eleanor's "My Day" columns in the Kansas City Star. Mother would look up and say, "I'm sure she is better than he is," referring, of course, to Eleanor being better than Franklin. My family was rock-ribbed Republican and disapproved of Franklin's policies. I wondered then—and still do—why my mother and other women of her era had so much reverence for Eleanor. I have been looking for the answer ever since.
Endeavors to tell in one volume the story of an American icon, integrating her personal and public lives. This work offers an introduction to her many public roles—as a journalist, First Lady from 1933-1945, delegate to the United Nations (1945-1952), political leader, media personality—as well as her multifaceted personal life.
The New York Times bestseller from prizewinning author David Michaelis presents a “stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.
In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have been intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt since I was a little girl in Sedalia, Missouri, and my mother read me Eleanor's "My Day" columns in the Kansas City Star. Mother would look up and say, "I'm sure she is better than he is," referring, of course, to Eleanor being better than Franklin. My family was rock-ribbed Republican and disapproved of Franklin's policies. I wondered then—and still do—why my mother and other women of her era had so much reverence for Eleanor. I have been looking for the answer ever since.
This depicts the intimacy between Eleanor and Lorena Hickok, a reporter for the Associated Press, that existed at the time Eleanor first moved into the White House in spite of vast differences between the social backgrounds of the two women. Describes Hickok's influence on Eleanor's contacts with other women reporters as well as Hickok's undercover reports on poverty-stricken areas for the Roosevelt administration that prompted Eleanor to personally undertake relief efforts in West Virginia.
A warm, intimate account of the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok-a relationship that, over more than three decades, transformed both women's lives and empowered them to play significant roles in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history
In 1932, as her husband assumed the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt entered the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the First Lady with dread. By that time, she had put her deep disappointment in her marriage behind her and developed an independent life-now threatened by the public role she would be forced to play. A lifeline came to her in the…
I'm a history professor at the University of Mississippi and I've been a political junkie for a long time. I really began following politics during the 1988 presidential election and I vividly remember reading about the race in the newspaper every morning and then watching the evening news coverage each night. Thus, it seemed like the perfect topic for my second book. It was really fascinating to see the similarities and differences between my memories and the sources from the time.
This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s.
Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.
Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of…
My family is a marvelously mixed bunch: lesbian, gay, and straight relatives; Jewish and Latin relatives; relatives along a spectrum of economic situations, abilities, and political views. The policy work that I do connects me with social justice advocates from across NYC’s multiple ethnic, racial, religious, and LGBTQ communities. The wildly disparate voices that surround me illuminate both the power of communal ties and the dangers of narrow identity labeling. A central quest behind my work, my reading, and my writing has thus always been to balance and respect everything at once: the cultural structures that sustain us; the individual quirks that challenge and complicate those structures; and the universalities that cross all cultural borders.
In this slender, fictionalized account of the “hidden in plain sight” romance between sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued reporter Lorena Hickok and larger-than-life First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, we get a gloriously slanted insiders’ view of a pivotal period in American history. This is emphatically a “lesbian love story”—explicit in its depictions of both the pleasures of female sensuality and the tolls of enforced secrecy. It is also—bluntly and forthrightly—a “middle-aged love story,” with all the attendant sea changes, accommodations, and regrets. Most of all, it’s the story of the two wittiest, savviest, best-positioned women anyone could ever encounter. “As Churchill said (to me),” the fictional Lorena begins one of her marvelous anecdotes. And the thing is, he probably did.
For readers of The Paris Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue comes a “sensuous, captivating account of a forbidden affair between two women” (People)—Eleanor Roosevelt and “first friend” Lorena Hickok.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Financial Times • San Francisco Chronicle • New York Public Library • Refinery29 • Real Simple
Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, “Hick,” as she’s known to her friends and…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a philosopher and author from Australia with a special interest in defending liberal rights and freedoms. For many years now, I’ve been worried about the erosion of liberalism in its fundamental sense that relates to individual liberty. Everywhere we look, unfortunately – and from all sides of politics – there are pressures to conform and attacks on free inquiry and speech. All too often, what’s worse, we cave in to those pressures and attacks. I value deep scholarship and intellectual rigor but also clear, vivid writing. I aim for those qualities in my own books and articles, and I’m sure you’ll find them in the five books on my list.
Helena Rosenblatt correctly finds liberalism’s origins in the French Revolution, but she emphasizes its much longer prehistory, going back to the ancient Romans. She conveys a wide range of ideas in the liberal tradition of political thought and practice and especially draws attention to the values of generosity, civic-mindedness, and love of freedom.
Rosenblatt does not stint from describing the less attractive sides of some liberal thinkers and theories, especially in Europe during the nineteenth century. This is a beautifully written work of scholarship showing mastery of historical detail.
The changing face of the liberal creed from the ancient world to today
The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry-and a term of derision-in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. She debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition, and shows how it was only during the Cold War that it was refashioned into an American…
Well before I trained as a scholar, I was an activist motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights and social justice. Those commitments continued throughout my academic career and have now morphed into a resolve to write about recent threats to liberal order, democracy, and justice. The election results of 2016 – the triumph of “leave” in the Brexit vote and of Donald Trump in the Presidential election, forced me to rethink the history of things I have come to cherish – liberal order, democracy, and social and racial justice – how support for them has ebbed, and why they now require vigorous and informed defense.
Ikenberry is the leading scholar writing about the origins, the evolution, and the working of the liberal international order.
He sees deep connections between liberal internationalism, liberal democracy, and democratic capitalism.
Ikenberry charts the transformations that have occurred in the liberal order, from its successful creation after the Second World War to its consolidation and expansion after the end of the Cold War to the challenges it currently faces.
He is acutely aware of liberal order’s faults and limitations, but insists that it remains the world’s best hope.
A sweeping account of the rise and evolution of liberal internationalism in the modern era, selected as a Best Book of 2021 by Foreign Affairs
"A thoughtful and profound defence of liberal internationalism-both as a political philosophy and as a guide to future actions."-Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
"The crowning achievement of [Ikenberry's] decades-long work explaining and defending the liberal international order."-Michael Hirsch, Foreign Policy
For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the…
I'm intrigued by boundaries and the relationships between different ideologies, or isms. In 1992, I joined the European Project at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. This was a fascinating group of people from Israel, Palestine, and Germany who studied the connections between Europe and the Middle East. Then I opened a new field of studies that continues to engage me: multiculturalism. In my books and articles (most recent:The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab), I examine the extent to which democracy may interfere in the cultural affairs of minorities within democracy, how to find a balance between individual rights and group rights, and whether liberalism and multiculturalism are reconcilable.
Studying at Oxford, I was surprised that quite a few of my lecturers, including Ronald Dworkin and Jerry Cohen, hardly ever discussed the importance of culture in our lives. As someone who believes in the motto Know from where you are coming in order to know where you are going, I do not underestimate the power of culture, religion, and tradition in shaping communities. My library research discovered the excellent DPhil dissertation that Kymlicka wrote while he was in Oxford. This dissertation was a fresh air for me, accentuating the need to take culture seriously. Kymlicka reshaped his dissertation into this book which I regard as one of his very best books. Kymlicka presents the liberal view about the nature and value of community culture and bridges between liberalism and multiculturalism. I share this view and promote it in my own studies.
Kymlicka and I later cooperated in writing together…
Liberalism is often described as a theory about the proper relationship between the individual and the state, but it also contains a broader account of the relationship between the individual and society. This book presents the liberal view about the nature and value of community and culture in an unusually explicit and systematic way, and links it to more familiar liberal views on individual rights and state neutrality.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a philosopher and author from Australia with a special interest in defending liberal rights and freedoms. For many years now, I’ve been worried about the erosion of liberalism in its fundamental sense that relates to individual liberty. Everywhere we look, unfortunately – and from all sides of politics – there are pressures to conform and attacks on free inquiry and speech. All too often, what’s worse, we cave in to those pressures and attacks. I value deep scholarship and intellectual rigor but also clear, vivid writing. I aim for those qualities in my own books and articles, and I’m sure you’ll find them in the five books on my list.
Despite its subtitle, this is one of the most comprehensive histories of liberal thought and practice ever written and is up to date with many recent developments, having been published in late 2023. It should be read alongside Edmund Fawcett’s similarly grand-scale history of liberalism.
Where it differs is in a somewhat more polemical or argumentative tone from Alan S. Kahan, who has a distinctive interpretation of liberalism, its essence, and its many challenges (particularly current challenges from populist politics). Kahan’s arguments won’t convince everybody, but they’ll dominate discussions of liberalism as a political outlook for years to come. If you don’t agree with Kahan’s interpretation of his topic, you’ll at least need to explain why–his book is that important.
A provocative new history of liberalism that also provides a road map for today's liberals
Freedom from Fear offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical debate, Alan Kahan charts the development of Western liberalism from the late eighteenth century to the present. Examining key liberal thinkers and issues, Kahan shows how liberalism is both a response to fear and a source of hope: the search for a world in which no one need be afraid.
Freedom from Fear reveals how liberal arguments typically rely…
