NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.†In Franklin and Winston; Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship; and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails; cigarettes; and cigars; they met; often secretly; in places as far-flung as Washington; Hyde Park; Casablanca; and Teheran; talking to each other of war; politics; the burden of command; their health; their wives; and their children. Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first; Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite; students of history; politicians of the first rank; they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated; dismissed as arrogant; and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story; with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister; who rallied his nation in its darkest hour; standing alone against Adolf Hitler; was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets; FDR liked to keep people off balance; including his wife; Eleanor; his White House aides—and Winston Churchill. Confronting tyranny and terror; Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families; two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history. Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’ s great secret love; Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd; the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman; and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle. Hitler brought them together; later in the war; they drifted apart; but even in the autumn of their alliance; the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft; Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.
#368615 in Books Spero Patrick 2016-10-04Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.00 x 1.10 x 6.20l; .0 #File Name: 0812248619352 pagesFrontier Country The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania
Review
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. along with a colonial border war with Maryland that Pennsylvania won more with good government than with bullets and battles whiBy Paul D NewmanPatrick Spero’s Frontier Country is a remarkable re-conceptualization of Pennsylvania’s political development from an initially successful Proprietary colony in 1684; to a failed state in the wake of the Seven Years War; to a reinvigorated Revolutionary State in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Spero seeks to upend the field of “Frontier;†“Backcountry;†and “Borderlands†history popular since the days of Frederick Jackson Turner by accepting the eighteenth century American and British definition of the word frontier; and applying that meaning to the actions of the Empire; the Proprietors; the Assembly; and frontier settlers to reveal the transformative power of “frontier political culture†that culminated in the American Revolution. Unlike Turner’s vision of a frontier as a zone of opportunity; eighteenth-century people saw them as zones of death and destruction; and the fear and terror of living in a frontier; or of having one’s community suddenly become a frontier; led to a culture that demanded liberty through security that demanded the elimination of a race of people. Scholars of early Pennsylvania; the American Revolution; and especially of “frontier studies†will find Spero’s book immensely valuable to understanding the intersection of all three. This book is very accessible to the general reader as well.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Politics and passions on the Pennsylvania frontiersBy MoviegoerThis fascinating book is deeply researched enough to please professional historians; yet enthralling enough to keep armchair historians turning its pages. It weaves the story of the politics and passions of the settlers who pushed colonial borders beyond Philadelphia to the Indian territory of the Susquehanna River to the Allegheny Mountains and eventually to Fort Pitt in today's western PA. Along the way there are events that will surprise many readers---border disputes and skirmishes between the Pennsylvania colony and the colonies of Maryland; Connecticut; and Virginia that saw Connecticut and Virginia lay claim to vast swaths of modern day PA; violent uprisings by settlers on the frontiers known as the Paxton Boys and the Black Boys against what they viewed as the threat of the Indians; and disputes with the British---all of which helped shape the Pennsylvania colonial.government and eventually had as much to do with igniting the American war for independence as anything that happened in Boston or Philadelphia. This "not too big" history book tells a very big; very interesting story.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Early PA history gone wild.By Customerinteresting book about early Pennsylvania; including the three wars fought against other states. Shows were the seeds of the current political problems in Pa between Urban centers and rural areas were sown.
