Summary Of Eleanor Roosevelt A Personal And Public Life

Gavin Wallace
DC History 1302 – 6th Period
Book Review
4/13/14
“Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life” Book Review

Youngs, J. William T. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2000. xvi + 10 (illustrations) + 292 pp. $29.59 (paper) ISBN 0-321-35232-1

The third edition of ”Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life”, written by J. William T. Youngs, was published in 2005 by Pearson Longman Inc. and is also part of the Library of American Biography Series, edited by Mark C. Carnes. The biography itself and all of its contents are 292 pages. These pages include a table of contents, an editor’s and author’s preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, study and discussion questions, a note on the source, and an index. The biography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962), wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945), pays great respects to whom Youngs believes to be the most influential woman during the 20th century. By writing one third of the book on E. Roosevelt’s early life, Youngs is able to support his thesis which states that E. Roosevelt’s suffering, and the achievements of her early years made it possible for her to be known as the greatest American woman of the twentieth century. While Youngs was able to support this theory throughout the book, he failed to tie his original thoughts up towards his conclusion, making his original thesis hard to follow.
One of three children, E. Roosevelt was born October 11th, 1884. Her parents, Anna Hall and Elliot Roosevelt, had two other children: Elliot Roosevelt Jr. and Hall Roosevelt. E. Roosevelt’s childhood was a tough one at first. Her father, Elliott Roosevelt, younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt, suffered from a mental depres...

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...nd enjoyable. The one thing that did bug me was that Youngs does not directly tie his thesis directly to the end of the book. It would have been helpful for the reader to be able to confirm Youngs’s intention for writing the book, but since he fails to re-introduce his argument in the end, it left me questioning that intention.
If Youngs’s thesis was to illustrate how the sufferings and achievements of E. Roosevelt’s life was what made it possible for her to become the influential woman that she was, then Youngs did a great job by incorporating so much of E. Roosevelt’s early life into the biography. But if Youngs did not intend for that to be his thesis then this book was a confusing mess that left readers wondering why he put so much of E. Roosevelt’s early life in the book but a minimal amount of her life during her husband’s long presidential terms in office.