RaveThe GuardianRobert Dallek’s new biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt might have simply been a very good book. Given Trump, it feels like an essential one … Dallek, who has previously written biographies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, here captures a full life in a single volume with brisk prose … Dallek shows how Old Dutch family wealth, noblesse oblige, tolerance, a debilitating disease, and an interest in modernist culture combined to create in FDR an instinctively brilliant politician. The author says he wrote his account to remind ‘a younger generation with limited knowledge of American history, of what great political leadership looks like’ … Dallek is a master of the genre of presidential biography, but how can one continue being a Rembrandt, detailing the light and shadow of golden age captains, after the arrival of the grotesque, when political culture has become a carnival?
