Eleanor, David Michaelis
Eleanor, David Michaelis
9 Rating(s)
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
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Eleanor

Bestseller

Author: David Michaelis

Narrator: Gabra Zackman

Unabridged: 19 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/06/2020


Synopsis

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 Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier, social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept her FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men.

Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together.

This “absolutely spellbinding,” (The Washington Post) “complex and sensitive portrait” (The Guardian) is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever.

About David Michaelis

David Michaelis is the bestselling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N.C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. He lives in New York with his wife and family.

About Gabra Zackman

Gabra Zackman knows romance. Her clever and “thrilling romantic caper” (Library Journal) Bod Squad series was inspired by the more than one hundred romance and women’s fiction titles she has narrated for audio. She divides her time between her native New York City and Denver, Colorado.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy on September 16, 2020

"All her life, Eleanor believed that she had to earn love--by pleasing others, by undertaking ever more numberless duties, by one more tour of useful Rooseveltian doing.~ from Eleanor by David Michaelis Compared to her beautiful parents, she was plain. Her mother was a social butterfly and her father......more

Goodreads review by Trish on March 03, 2023

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." While me reading this book in what GR dubbs „Women‘s History Month“ is purely coincidental, I do like reading about historically important people and think that women have been overlooked quite a lot until relatively recently. This biography, I‘m happy......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on December 21, 2020

I know there are a lot of raving reviews for this book, but I couldn't get past the first 100 pages. I should have know when the first 10 pages of the book was a list of people in the book to help you keep track. I found the writing to be stilted, jerky and so riddled with footnotes I couldn't seem......more

Goodreads review by Donald on January 27, 2021

I was excited to see one of my favorite college professors quoted in this book. I had to start this review with that because I really loved Leonard Dinnerstein and try to emulate his thinking over forty years after studying under him. This biography is detailed and very well documented. It was great......more

Goodreads review by Steve on December 04, 2020

[URL not allowed] Published just two months ago, “Eleanor” is the most recent of David Michaelis‘s half-dozen books. Among his best-known previous titles are “N.C. Wyeth: A Biography” which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography in 1999 and “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography......more


Quotes

"It may not have been until Hillary or Michelle that a first lady garnered nearly as much acclaim as Eleanor Roosevelt. Gabra Zackman narrates Michaelis's biography at just the right pitch. It is never overly dramatic, despite many tragic and heartbreaking events, and steers clear of hagiography. The audiobook engages by recalling life during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Not surprisingly, the story gathers steam once FDR is elected president. Anyone who is not aware of the impact Eleanor had on Franklin will revel at hearing how the first lady moved her husband to take up the plight of the less fortunate. This listen may focus on events of more than a half century ago, but it remains timely to this day."