For all the books written about FDR, there's room on the shelf for a great one-volume life that does full justice to who he was, what he overcame and what he achieved. This one isn't it, though it's ...

(“FDR” by Jean Edward Smith, Random House, 858 pages, $35). In January 1943, after meeting with Franklin Roosevelt at Casablanca on the African coast to plot future military operations during the ...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself ...

The most critically acclaimed biography published so far this year is "Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage" (Free Press, $30). Douglas Waller, a former ...

Last month, President-elect Barack Obama roused book publishers from their recession-induced torpor by mentioning in a TV interview that he was reading a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first ...

Last Memorial Day, Doris Kearns Goodwin executive produced the History Channel docuseries “Teddy Roosevelt.” This Memorial Day, she tackles another Roosevelt with “FDR,” premiering Monday on the ...

"The Woman Behind the New Deal" (Doubleday, 398 pages, $35), by Kirstin Downey: Reading the biography of FDR's labor secretary, Frances Perkins, brings to mind the old saying about how Ginger Rogers ...