FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT

A POLITICAL LIFE

ROBERT DALLEK Allen Lane, 704pp, £30, Oldie price £18.73 inc p&p

Dallek, who has previously written biographies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Truman, here takes on the four-times election winner who led America through the Depression and the Second World War. He ‘tells the story well and clearly’, wrote Richard Overy in the Literary Review, ‘but because he has chosen a conventional chronological narrative, he leaves himself little space to stand back and assess, critically or otherwise, the political qualities that he ascribes to his subject’. As a result, ‘the political man is hard to pin down’. For Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the

Sunday Times, Dallek’s book is ‘perfectly judicious’ as a guide to Roosevelt’s career, but ‘fails to bring his subject alive as a human being’. Roosevelt contracted polio at the age of 39 and had to rely on crutches or a wheelchair thereafter. ‘Did it change him? Did it frighten him? Did it make him more determined? Crucial questions for a biographer, surely? But Dallek is in such a hurry that even as you are thinking about it he has already moved on to something else.’ Despite his achievements, Roosevelt emerges from Dallek’s book ‘with all the style and swagger of a Tuscaloosa sales manager’.

Conrad Black, another FDR biographer, was loftily dismissive in his characteristically long review for

Standpoint. ‘There is not much to guide the reader to insightful conclusions about Roosevelt’s life or presidency that a person already conversant with the subject would not already know,’ wrote Black. ‘This isn’t a bad book, and is a passable read, but there are better books on the subject.’ (Black forbore to mention his own contribution to the genre.)