The ninth volume in the Oxford History of the United States series and a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Kennedy's narrative spans the Great Depression, FDR's New Deal, and the Second World War.
[Kennedy's Freedom From Fear] provides us with an engrossing narrative of a momentous time, the best one-volume account of the Roosevelt era currently available ... Kennedy is concerned with the big political, economic and military questions, the large decisions, who made them and why. Dead white males predominate. Not that Kennedy fails to consider minorities and women...but these fashionable topics are decidedly secondary to his story ... American culture, particularly popular culture, is all but ignored. Yet...he is still able to soldier along with dramatic discussions of the Great Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the totalitarians and World War II. Indeed, with event piling on history-making event, Freedom From Fear is, despite its 936-page length, a miracle of compression ... for sheer drama, nothing can top his pages describing how a basically isolationist nation entered the war in the first place. They are the high point of Freedom From Fear.
Mr Kennedy lapses unblushingly, and far too often, into ancient journalese ... But that is really the worst that can be said of this otherwise splendid book. It is a worthy addition to the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States and deserves to become the standard work of introduction to its three subjects ... Mr Kennedy is master of his material in a double sense. He exhibits a comprehensive knowledge of events, making very few factual slips ... Yet Mr Kennedy knows his period, and is also an expert in the vast accumulation of scholarship which it has called forth ... Much of the story is familiar, but all of it is put together in a way to advance understanding and necessitate a new approach to American history in the Roosevelt era ... One of the most valuable forms of scholarly originality.
David M. Kennedy has undertaken an original approach to modern history ... Freedom From Fear is more than one president's personal and political story. It's a wide-angle look at America in peace and war that brings into focus the nature of leadership and the conflicting regional and philosophical divisions in the nation ... Kennedy succeeds in providing a panoramic view of the great battles in every theater of warfare ... Based on his detailed footnotes and very helpful bibliographic essay, it's evident he has done a superb job of research in his military as well as his home-front writings ... The kind of book prizes are made for.
