The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Book

This is a very careful, guarded autobiography, written towards the end of Eleanor's life. And it was an extraordinary life, indeed. It is a challenge for anyone to write a candid autobiography, of course; there are people in everyone's life who deserve privacy and forgiveness and respect despite their failings. But it makes for a sterile book. There is nothing salacious here; no insight at all in to the experience of being married to a serial womanizer, for example, or even acknowledgement that she was in fact married to one. The years after his polio are treated as a mild rough patch and largely glossed over. This makes the parts about her married life pretty tedious, and little more than an accounting of who came to dinner at the White House when, with a big chunk detailing her visit with the Queen of England. Even her political activities during this time are fairly opaque, and she often refers to incidents with the assumption that everyone will know what she is talking about, which might have been more true at the books publication fifty years ago. It is clear, however, that FDR was an absolute genius in so many ways, with insatiable curiosity, a prodigious memory, a gift for listening to various points of view, and an unsurpassed sense for political power. Eleanor was obviously gifted in her own right, but there is no question she gained much through the opportunity to closely observe and be tutored by him.

The most interesting parts of the book to me were towards the end when she recounts her visits to the Soviet Union and shares her thoughts about the threats communism posed. It is fascinating to read someone's impressions, the visceral fear, at a point in time from the near-ish future, when you know at least how part of the story plays out. She explains that the people in communist countries are then not free, but they are fed, and that forty years previous they were not free but unfed. She implores the western world to not underestimate the power of the freedom to eat. It is also a bit sad to see her genuine hope in the UN to make things better, which seems to not have really worked out either, at least to the degree she imagined.