The Roosevelt Women
A Portrait In Five Generations
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Roosevelt name conjures up images of powerful Presidents and dashing men of high society. But few people know much about the extraordinary network of women that held the Roosevelt clan together through war, scandal, and disease. In The Roosevelt Women, Betty Boyd Caroli weaves together stories culled from a rich store of letters, memoirs, and interviews to chronicle nine extraordinary Roosevelt women across a century and a half of turbulent history. She examines the Roosevelt women as mothers, daughters, wives, and, beyond that, as world travelers, authors, campaigners, and socialites -- in short, as themselves. She reveals how they demonstrated the energy and intellectual curiosity that defined their famous family, as well as the roles they played in the intrigues, scandals, and accomplishments that were hallmarks of the Roosevelt clan. From the much maligned Sara Delano (who sired Franklin and by turns terrified and supported Eleanor) to Theodore's irrepressible daughter, Alice ("I can either rule the country or control Alice," Teddy once said) to the beloved Bamie, who was the only mother Alice ever knew, and the model of everything she never was in life, to the exceptionally beautiful but ultimately overwhelmed Mittie, Theodore's mother, The Roosevelt Women is an intricate portrait of bold and talented women, a grand tale of both unbearable tragedies and triumphant achievements.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With numerous full biographies available, there is something unsatisfying about Caroli's brief, chapter-length life-summaries for Theodore Roosevelt's sharp-tongued daughter, Alice Longworth, and her less-quarrelsome cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, so often the target of Alice's barbs. More valuable are Caroli's profiles of fascinating Roosevelts less familiar to readers and biographers, women such as TR's second daughter, Ethel Derby (who died in 1977 after a lifetime of good works), and his niece Corinne Alsop (Republican political activist and mother of journalist Joseph Alsop), not to mention his sisters Corinne Robinson (writer and prot g e of Edith Wharton) and Anna Cowles (one of TR's most savvy political advisers). At the end of the book, one is left wishing Caroli (First Ladies and Inside the White House) had cast a wider net in her search for featured players. Why, for example, does preeminent anthropologist Anna C. Roosevelt (the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award) rate only five or six lines? And why do Selwa (Lucky) Roosevelt's few lines contain no hint of her distinguished foreign service career, or its culmination with the post of chief of protocol for the U.S. under Ronald Reagan? This often good book would have been much better without these and similar errors of omission. Illustrated.
