Review 261: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Life of Soul Searching and Self-Discovery by Ann Atkins

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Life of Soul Searching and Self-Discovery
by Ann Atkins
Flash History Press
Copyright © October 2011
ISBN: 978-0983478409
176 Pages
$19.95 Paperback
$7.99 Kindle

Reviewed by author Bob Cherny

Eleanor Roosevelt’s impact on current American culture is easy to underestimate. This book puts her back in her rightful place in her historical era as well as pointing out the initiatives she started that continue to this day. In spite of the power of her words and the strength of the coalitions she assembled, the battles she fought continue to be fought.

The book is liberally supplemented with quotes from Eleanor like this one, “I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come, and we must learn to work together all of us, regardless of race or creed or color… We go ahead together or we go down together…” This comment is as relevant today as it was when she made it half a century ago.

Anne Atkins’ prose is literate, and yet easy to read, with an understanding of which issues that were as topical when Eleanor dealt with them as they are today. It is this ability to make one of the greatest women in American history as contemporary as any woman on today’s political scene that gives the book its greatest power.

This quote comes from early in the book:

Are these “the good old days” if life expectancy is a brief forty-five years? Millions die each year of infectious diseases and thirty-five thousand die every year in industrial accidents. There is no workers’ compensation, no unemployment pay and no insurance. Severance pay is given because something at work got severed—a hand or a foot. In any arena Eleanor fights injustice and perseveres against overwhelming odds and chilling cruelties. Like Wonder Woman in support hose, she will win battles on the local, the national and the global scale. Her life is an example of moral courage and she becomes internationally known as “First Lady of the World.”

First, she must survive her childhood.

Anne varies her tempo, her writing style and her pacing as appropriate to the events in Eleanor’s life she is describing and at the same time keeps the work simple enough to use as a middle school or high school text book. While this is hardly the most erudite writing I have ever seen, it is solid, competent and conveys its message in a way that makes it read as smoothly as a mainstream novel.

One of the most difficult tasks for a biographer is to put the subject in their historical context and then draw the results of the subject’s actions into the present day. This is the book’s greatest strength. It is not the be-all-and-end-all in-depth biography of Eleanor Roosevelt with mountains or original research and hundreds of footnotes, but it is an open and accessible work that pays homage to one of the greatest women in American history.

The book is liberally illustrated with photographs which are carefully chosen to support the text. For the most parts these work, but their effectiveness is limited in some cases by the quality of the originals. There are a few photos that I am not sure I would have included, but even those do help further the story although not as much as some others.

The sidebar quotes are both an enhancement and a distraction. As with the photos, while I agree with the inclusions of most of them, I am not convinced some of the others belonged as sidebars and not in the body of the text. From the thousands of quotes and photos available, choosing the few to use must have been a mind-numbing task, but the final effect is solid and helps illuminate the written words.

I recommend this book for anyone over the age of fourteen who cares about where America is headed.