Helpful Score: 2
Foreword by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.
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A surprisingly large number of readers of Eleanor and Franklin wrote to express the hope that Mr. Lash would go on to write a sequel to that book covering my mother's years alone. Here is that sequel. It will be up to the readers to say whether it maintains the high standards of the earlier book; in my view it does. It is the story of my mother alone, but even more, it is the story of those years in which her internal development and her work and experience with my father come to full and creative maturity. We, her children, watched with pride as she won the love and affection as well as respect of people everywhere and truly earned the title of First Lady of the World.
... Here in Mr. Lash's careful and detailed documentation of Mother's encounters with the Communists at the United Nations, they will see her moving from the belief that our good will and readiness to compromise would be reciprocated by the Communists to the realization that Stalin's emissaries respected strength alone. Those who speak critically of the West's "cold war" mentality in the years that followed Father's death should examine closely, as Mr. Lash's chronicle enables them to do, my mother's experiences at the United Nations.
Equally illuminating, and singularly moving, is the book's account of Mother's role in helping establish a homeland for the Jewish people. If young people today want to understand why both my mother's generation and mine invested this cause with the passion and faithfulness that liberals in the thirties gave to Republican Spain, they should read Mr. Lash's account of the birth of Israel.
...
A surprisingly large number of readers of Eleanor and Franklin wrote to express the hope that Mr. Lash would go on to write a sequel to that book covering my mother's years alone. Here is that sequel. It will be up to the readers to say whether it maintains the high standards of the earlier book; in my view it does. It is the story of my mother alone, but even more, it is the story of those years in which her internal development and her work and experience with my father come to full and creative maturity. We, her children, watched with pride as she won the love and affection as well as respect of people everywhere and truly earned the title of First Lady of the World.
... Here in Mr. Lash's careful and detailed documentation of Mother's encounters with the Communists at the United Nations, they will see her moving from the belief that our good will and readiness to compromise would be reciprocated by the Communists to the realization that Stalin's emissaries respected strength alone. Those who speak critically of the West's "cold war" mentality in the years that followed Father's death should examine closely, as Mr. Lash's chronicle enables them to do, my mother's experiences at the United Nations.
Equally illuminating, and singularly moving, is the book's account of Mother's role in helping establish a homeland for the Jewish people. If young people today want to understand why both my mother's generation and mine invested this cause with the passion and faithfulness that liberals in the thirties gave to Republican Spain, they should read Mr. Lash's account of the birth of Israel.
