"Take a place wherever you are and be something…"

          Theodore Roosevelt’s advice might be the watchword of this great American line of aristocrats.  Among those who rose to the dictum were Isaac, the sugar-refiner who played a significant part in the Revolution and founded the New York Bank; Nicholas, the inventor who shares the credit for introducing the first steamboat; Alice, Theodore’s vital daughter, and, of course, Franklin Delano and Eleanor.

          In tracing the course of the Roosevelts, Allen Churchill paints a sociological history, highlighted by the barbed warfare between the Oyster Bay branch and the Hyde Park coterie, a saga of Republicans vs. Democrats. There are also moments of personal drama… the tragedy of Theodore Jnr. losing his wife and mother in the same night… his attempted assassination and insistence on finishing an election speech with a bullet lodged four inches in his chest… the courage of F.D.R. through the first awful years of paralysis…

          Set against the stirring history of the United States as it developed from the wild country of the seventeenth century into the industrialist giant it is today, the Roosevelt story is thus a biography of depth and breadth and fascinating importance.