Download The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America's Greatest Political Family AudioBook Free
The award-winning author presents a provocative, carefully modern revisionist biographical background of 1 of America's biggest and most important young families - the Roosevelts - revealing heretofore unidentified family secrets and detailing intricate family rivalries with his signature cinematic flair. Drawing on recently covered historical documents and interviews with the long-silent "illegitimate" branch of the family, William J. Mann paints a stylish, meticulously explored, and groundbreaking group portrait of this famous family. Mann argues that the Roosevelts' go up to electric power and prestige was actually driven by a series of powerful personal contests that at times devolved into bloodstream sport. His convincing and eye-opening masterwork is the storyplot of a family at war with itself, of public Darwinism at its most ruthless - in which the strong devoured the vulnerable and repudiated the inconvenient. Mann focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt, who, he argues, experienced this brutality firsthand, witnessing her uncle Theodore cruelly demolish her father, Elliott - his brother and bitter rival - for political expediency. Mann presents a fascinating alternative picture of Eleanor, contending that "worshipful niece" in fact bore a grudge against TR for the others of her life and dares to tell the truth about her personal human relationships without obfuscations, explanations, or product labels. Mann also brings into emphasis Eleanor's cousins, TR's children, whose experiences propelled the family rivalry but haven't before been fully chronicled, as well as her illegitimate half brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann, who inherited his family's ambition and skill without their name and privilege. Growing up in poverty just miles from his wealthy relatives, Elliott Mann embodied the American dream, growing to middle-class prosperity and enjoying one of the extremely few happy long-term marriages in the Roosevelt saga. For the very first time, The Wars of the Roosevelts also contains the experiences of Elliott's little princess and grandchildren. Deeply subconscious and finely rendered, The Wars of the Roosevelts illuminates not only the enviable strengths but also the profound shame of the remarkable and important family.
