Books, Arts & Manners: All in the Family

The Roosevelts: An American Saga, by Peter Collier, with David Horowitz (Simon & Schuster, 502 pp., $27.50)

PETER COLLIER and David Horowitz have accomplished a remarkable feat: they have wrought out of well-known and even stale materials an engrossing and amusing history. They have woven the stories of the two branches of the most famous political family of our century, those of Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, into a cohesive tale of emulations and feuds, of hates and alliances, in which the great events of six Presidencies (already amply chronicled elsewhere) are subordinated to the portraits of the individual family members. Being a Roosevelt alone is to be granted full treatment in this volume; one need not be a distinguished one. The marriages and sprees of Elliott, for example, are given as much space as TR Junior’s governorship of the Philippines, and Kermit’s depressions and suicide, the same attention as FDR Junior’s career as a congressman. The reader who seeks further enlightenment about trust-busting or the New Deal must look elsewhere.

TM

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Thomas Mallon

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The Roosevelts: An American Saga, by Peter Collier, with David Horowitz (Simon & Schuster, 502 pp., $27.50)

PETER COLLIER and David Horowitz have accomplished a remarkable feat: they have wrought out of well-known and even stale materials an engrossing and amusing history. They have woven the stories of the two branches of the most famous political family of our century, those of Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, into a cohesive tale of emulations and feuds, of hates and alliances, in which the great events of six Presidencies (already amply chronicled elsewhere) are subordinated to the portraits of the individual family members. Being a Roosevelt alone is to be granted full treatment in this volume; one need not be a distinguished one. The marriages and sprees of Elliott, for example, are given as much space as TR Junior’s governorship of the Philippines, and Kermit’s depressions and suicide, the same attention as FDR Junior’s career as a congressman. The reader who seeks further enlightenment about trust-busting or the New Deal must look elsewhere.