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The Night War by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Jun11

I’ve read and reviewed a few other books by contemporary middle grade and young adult author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley:

I’ve also read, but not reviewed, The War That Saved My Life and The War I Finally Won. Ms. Bradley tends to write about several topics and settings: World War II Europe, France in particular, Catholicism and religion, abused children, children with disabilities. The Night War is a Jewish Holocaust story set in France, 1942. When Miri (Miriam), a twelve year old Jewish girl, and her parents are routed from their apartment in Paris by the French police and herded onto buses to be taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver, Miri becomes separated from her family but she given the responsibility of escaping with and caring for her two year old neighbor, Nora Rosenbaum. Mrs. Rosenbaum tells Miri to run, to take Nora, and to somehow try to get to Switzerland. And Miri is faced with a choice, the first of many impossible choices: will she try to find her parents in the Velodrome or escape with Nora?

Miri chooses to run, and with the help of a French nun, she manages to get away from the Nazi roundup of Jews in Paris. Eventually, Miri, who takes the name of Marie, and Nora end up in Chenonceaux, near the castle of Chenonceau, which was long ago the dwelling of Diane de Poitiers and subsequently, Catherine de Medici. These women and their history become a significant part of Miri/Marie’s story. (SPOILER WARNING: Here be ghosts and ghost-like characters.)

And so do the nuns of Chenonceaux. Marie is hidden in a convent school, and she again is faced with choices. Does she stay in relative safety in the school, or does she attempt to take Nora and flee to Vichy France and then on to Switzerland? Is Nora safer with her foster family, or is she in danger of forgetting her family and her Jewish heritage? Can Miri pretend to be Catholic and still pray to God in her own Jewish way? And there are other choices to be made as Marie stumbles upon a secret resistance network and is asked to help smuggle others out of Nazi-controlled France.

This story with its emphasis on personal responsibility and making good choices, and the consequences of bad choices, is an excellent one for middle grade readers who are just waking up to their own responsibilities and moral choices in life. Recommended for readers age 10 and up, or as soon as you think your reader is ready for hard things about the Holocaust and the evil that people do. Not graphic.

The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler by William L. Shirer

Feb14

What would lead a person to read an entire book, even a children’s middle grade nonfiction book, that takes the reader inside the life and mind of Adolf Hitler, the arch-villain of the twentieth century? Well, there’s something rather fascinating about trying to understand how Hitler became Hitler, synonymous with the most evil, murderous, racist, anti-Semitic dictator and warmonger ever. William L. Shirer, author of the 1000+ page tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (for adults), was in a position to study this question and come to some kind of conclusions, if anyone from the Allied side of the war was. As an American correspondent in Berlin, Shirer actually met Hitler, listened to many of his spell-binding speeches, and observed him over the course of several years before and during World War II. The result of Shirer’s observations and his journalist’s eye for character and for a story is this book, written for children in the Landmark history series, but suited to readers of all ages.

Shirer begins his book with eleven year old Adolf, showing an independent streak even at that young age in aspiring to become an artist instead of the civil servant his father wanted him to be. I learned a lot about Hitler that I never knew before from this book, and I was reminded of a few “home truths” along the way. After his art career bombed because the art school wouldn’t let him in, said he had no talent, Herr Hitler became a tramp without a real job for several years, but a very well read tramp. He read and studied all the time while working very little. First lesson: readers may become leaders, but they may also become very bad leaders.

Chapter 7 of the book is called “Hitler Falls in Love,” and it tells a story I never knew or else had forgotten. In this chapter of the book and of Hitler’s life, he falls hard for his half-niece, the daughter of his half-sister. Her name was Gell Raubal, and Hitler declared after her death that she was the only woman he ever truly loved. You can read the story in Shirer’s book and decide for yourself whether or not “loved” is the right word to describe Hitler’s controlling obsession with a girl half his age. (The story of their brief “romance” is tastefully told, appropriate for middle grade and older children who will read the book, but icky nonetheless.)

After this personal interlude, the book moves on to Hitler’s political actions and aspirations and quickly into the war years. As he becomes more and more successful, in politics and in war, and gains more and more power, Hitler becomes more and more deranged. Shirer calls him “beyond any question a dangerous, irresponsible megalomaniac.” And yet (next paragraph) Hitler is able to maintain power, and be “so cool and cunning in his calculations and so bold in carrying them out that few could doubt that he well might be the military genius that he claimed to be.” This lead me to another unpleasant truth: a mentally ill egomaniacal murderer can act in a very lucid and intelligent manner for a long time. It is possible to be cunning, bold, and crazy.

Of course, this book chronicles the rise and fall of Hitler, so the craziness does come to an end. Shirer is to be commended for his ability to tell the story in a way that is appropriate for older children, but also truthful and candid in its presentation of Hitler’s horribly destructive life and actions. The book doesn’t completely explain the quandary of why the German people were so enamored of Herr Hitler or how he was able to fool so many people for so long into believing in his “genius”, but it does document in a very readable and engaging style, the rise and fall of a man who was “a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely.”

I recommend Shirer’s book for its insight and as a cautionary tale for those who would place their faith in any political leader. Hitler is dead, but it is still quite possible to be fooled by a seemingly lucid and benign leader who is actually a wolf in disguise.

Download a list of the entire Landmark history series in chronological order.

2021 MGF: In a Flash by Donna Jo Napoli

Nov11

I’ve enjoyed Donna Jo Napoli’s books in the past; the author blurb says she’s published more than eighty books for children in her long career. Most of the ones I’ve read have been fairy tale and folk tale retellings (The Wager and Zel) or historical adventure tales (Alligator Bayou and North and Song of the Magdalene). Ms. Napoli, a professor of linguistics and social justice at Swarthmore College, is a good writer. Her books tend to fall toward the upper end of the middle grade fiction age group, maybe even pushing into young adult. In a Flash has a child narrator/protagonist, eight years old at the beginning of the story, but the subject matter and setting, the horrible plight of two Italian sisters surviving on their own in WWII Japan (1940-1946), is harrowing enough to call for some maturity in the reader. I was appalled by the suffering that SImona and her little sister Carolina undergo, and I’m a grown up who knew what to expect when the children, toward the end of the story, end up in the city of Hiroshima.

Because the chapter headings have dates affixed at the beginning and the book is written in first person from Simona’s point of view, I thought at first that the author was trying to pretend that this was SImona’s diary or journal. However, the writing isn’t a child’s writing, and the story is told mostly in present tense. Neither of those choices works for a diary entry. So, I soon realized that the dates were just there to assist the reader in knowing how much time had passed between chapters and where the children were in terms of age and in regard to the war. I found the story fascinating, a little slow-moving at first, but the details about life in Tokyo and in Japan as a whole were vivid and enlightening. The cultural differences between Japanese manners, language, and expectations and Italian cultural mores manifest themselves through the eyes of two little girls who struggle to live as the Japanese do while remembering that they are also Italians.

As I indicated, the book doesn’t shy away from the gruesome details of the starvation, fear, political repression, and sheer misery and trauma of living in wartorn Japan, especially as hated Westerners, Italians who were at first welcomed as friends of the Japanese, then despised as traitors after Italy’s surrender to the Allies. The suffering of the common people of Japan, as well as the choice of some of them to resist the suicidal “patriotism” required of them, are also portrayed in the story.

Because of all the suffering and bombing and starvation and imprisonment, the novel read like a Holocaust story, but with a very different setting. I would recommend In a Flash for mature young people who have been reading about the horrors of World War II as a different perspective and view of the atrocities and difficulties of that time.

The Jersey Brothers by Sally Mott Freeman

Aug25

It’s raining; it’s pouring here in Houston, Texas. And Hurricane Harvey is headed for Corpus Christi and set to bring Houston a whole heck of a lot of more rain and possible/probable flooding. And my personal and family life is a bit of a mess, too.

However, if ever a book would cause me to pause and count my blessings, The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family’s Quest to Bring Him Home is that book. I thought the scenes and descriptions in Unbroken by Laura Hillebrand were harrowing and violent and disturbing, but this book tops that one for sheer cruelty and horror, man’s inhumanity to man. It’s not gratuitous, either. As far as I can tell the scenes and events the author describes really happened and were the central truths of the experience of Barton Cross, an American Navy prisoner of war to the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. YOu’ve heard of the “Bataan Death March”? Well, that’s described in this book in excruciating detail, even though Ensign Cross didn’t have to participate in that particular piece of history. (Many of his fellow prisoners did.) And the Battle of the Coral Sea and Iwo Jima and Tarawa—all described, again in horrific detail because one or the other of Barton’s two brothers were there. All three brothers were Navy officers, and the older two, Bill (the author’s father) and Benny, spent the war fighting on Navy ships or working in Washington, D.C. and trying all the time to find Barton, their baby brother.

Between the three of them the Jersey Brothers, called that because they were from New Jersey, had a sweeping view of the war in the Pacific, from FDR’s War Room in the White House to Pearl Harbor to the battles across the Pacific to the prisons and camps of Mindanao and Leyte and other Philippine islands. As I read about the experience each of the brothers and of their mother, Helen Cross, at home in New Jersey, I was overwhelmed with gratefulness both for their sacrifice and that of many, many others and for my relatively easy and uneventful life. We may have our problems, but not many of us since World War II have had to suffer or endure anything near what those “greatest generation” men and families did.

I was also convinced again that maybe the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best solution for an intractable problem—that of ending the war with the least possible loss of life for all concerned. The Japanese were employing suicide bombers (kamikaze) to a much greater extent than I ever remember reading about, and they were not willing to surrender. General MacArthur was intent on invading the Japanese islands, but the predictions of 600,000 American casualties—or more—convinced Truman that the threat of the atomic bomb would save many American and Japanese lives. The army was predicting Japanese casualties during an invasion to run over a million. The Japanese civilians and military were instructed to fight to the death, and many, many were willing to do so. Deaths from both atomic bomb blasts were much, much fewer than any of those estimates and many times fewer than the deaths already sustained by both the Allies and the Japanese in the battles across the Pacific. As horrific as the atomic bombs’ destruction and devastation were, they were not nearly as cruel as the terror and savage brutality that the Japanese visited upon the prisoners of war and the subject peoples that they conquered and ruled over in the Philippines and elsewhere. Take what you’ve read about the Holocaust and the concentration camps in Europe and transfer it to jungles of the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and you will have some idea of the absolute evil that was put to an end by the evil of two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, the atomic bombs were vicious and horrible, but maybe it was God’s mercy that allowed it to happen.

I recommend The Jersey Brothers, if you are able to read about the savagery and the suffering that went on during the war in the Pacific. It did make me thankful for the problems I have and the ones that I don’t.

We Were There at the Opening of the Atomic Era by James Munves

Jul16

I don’t know Mr. Munves, but the historical consultant for this book in the historical fiction series We Were There is also a character in the book, Dr. John R. Dunning. Dr. Dunning really was there. In fact, in his introduction to the story, Dr. Dunning explains:

“When Mr. Munves asked me to serve as his historical consultant in the writing of this book, I agreed at once because to me there is nothing more important than recapturing for our you men and women the wonderful creative excitement those days in which the atomic age began. When I went over Mr. Munves’ manuscript with him and discovered that I was a character in his story, I asked him if he would let me write a preface so as to make it clear to you that this Dr. Dunning is a real person. Most of the characters in the story, except for the young hero and his father, are real people.”

This book was published by Grossett and Dunlap in 1960, and it begins in 1942 with fifteen year old school boy, Tony Brenner, whose father works with Enrico Fermi, Professor John Dunning, and other scientists at Pupin Laboratories in New York City. When Tony makes a presentation to his high school science club about the possibilities of nuclear fission, his father is both proud and alarmed. “If a Nazi spy heard about your speech, he might think I was doing research in atomic energy,” says Papa Brenner, who is German immigrant and a physicist. Of course, that’s exactly what Dunning, Fermi, the fictional Brenner are doing, but the project is Top Secret. SO Tony gets taken into the top secret Manhattan Project so that he will learn what he needs to keep secret and why.

Tony’s family moves first to Chicago and then to New Mexico, all in pursuit of an atomic weapon that will defeat the Germans (and the Japanese) and win the war. The story presents most of the common arguments both for and against the bomb, and it gives a lot of scientific and technical information about the bomb and how it was developed. The ending sentences will give you a feel for the moral consensus of the book’s authors and consultants:

“It is not a nice thing to think about—that you helped make something that killed or hurt at least 230,000 people. But it doesn’t really matter whether this was done by bullet, sword, fire or atomic energy.
What does matter is that people wish to kill or hurt other people. . . .
The atom promises unlimited power. It also threatens the destruction of civilization. It is up to all of us to decide how it will be used.
The atom is neither good nor evil. Only people are.”

If you are interested in the events and people surrounding the Manhattan Project and the making, testing, and use of the atomic bomb, I would suggest you find a copy of this novel for a 1960-ish perspective on the project, its genesis and aftermath. For other children’s and young adult books on the subject, take a look at:

Fiction:
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages.
The Secret Project Notebook by Carolyn Reeder.
The Bomb by Theodore Taylor. Nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll.
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr.

Nonfiction:
Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin.
Sabotage: The Mission to Destroy Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb.

On July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m., the scientists of the Manhattan Project successfully tested the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Less than a month later, in August, the bomb was used to force the Japanese to surrender to Allied forces and end World War II.

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Aim by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Jan25

Aim is a prequel to Ms. Hostetter’s two books about Ann Fay Honeycutt, Blue and Comfort. Aim is about Junior Bledsoe, a secondary, but beloved, character in those other two books. (Ann Fay is the minor character in this one.)

The story takes place in 1941-1942. Fourteen year old Junior Bledsoe of Hickory, North Carolina has a troubled life. His father is a drunk. Junior doesn’t like school and can’t really see the point of it. His cantankerous and sometimes cruel granddaddy has moved in and taken over Junior’s bedroom. And World War II is about to involve the United States of America, except according to Granddaddy, “That yellow-bellied president is too chicken to take us to war. He ain’t half the man the Colonel was.” (The Colonel, in Grandaddy’s jargon, refers to Teddy Roosevelt.)

While Junior worries about school and the draft and impending war and that fact that his father seems distant and stern most of the time, Junior’s dad manages to go on a drinking binge and get killed in a accident. Or was it an accident? How can Junior go back to school when he’s not sure what really happened to his Pop? And what are they going to do about Grandaddy who’s becoming more verbally abusive and demanding every day? Should Junior drop out of school and get a job? Or join the army? Or investigate the moonshiners who may have been involved in Pop’s death?

This story is really all about a boy who’s trying to find his way to adulthood without the guidance of a father. However, the wonderful thing is that the community steps in to work together and separately to help Junior find his “aim” in life. Even when Junior Bledsoe makes some really poor choices and gets himself into what could become serious trouble, members of his extended community help his now-single mother guide Junior back to the path of good sense and responsible moral judgement. Junior is a good kid, but he’s looking for a way to deal with his father’s death and a way to earn the respect of his family and his friends. It’s not easy for a fourteen year old boy to lose his father, especially not the way Junior Pop dies. It was inspiring to read about how ordinary, ind neighbors, teachers, and friends help Junior to process his father’s death and to decide which parts of his father’s legacy he wants to continue and which parts he wants to leave in the grave.

Aim is an excellent coming-of-age novel, and I would also recommend Blue, about Ann Fay and her encounter with the dreaded disease of polio about a year after the events in Aim have taken place. I have yet to read Comfort, the sequel to Blue, but it is definitely on my TBR list.

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New York Herald Tribune Spring Book Festival Awards

Jan20

In 1937 two awards of $250 each were established by the New York Herald-Tribune for the best books for younger children and for older children published between January and June. In 1941 the system of awards was revised. Three awards, of $200.00 each, were given to the best books in the following three classes: young children, middle-age children, and other children. Each year a jury, composed of distinguished experts in the field of juvenile literature, was chosen to make the selections.

1937 Seven Simeons, by Boris Artzybasheff. For younger children. Illustrated by the author. (Viking.)

The Smuggler’s Sloop, by Robb White III. For older children. Illustrated by Andrew Wyeth. (Little.)

1938 The Hobbit, by J. R. Tolkien. For younger children. Illustrated by the author. (Houghton.)

The Iron Duke, by John R. Tunis. For older children. Illustrated by Johari Bull. (Harcourt)

1939 The Story of Horace, by Alice M. Coats. For younger children. Illustrated by the author. (Coward.)

The Hired Man’s Elephant, by Phil Stong. For older children. Illustrated by Doris Lee. (Dodd.)

1940 That Mario, by Lucy Herndon Crockett. For younger children. Illustrated by the author. (Holt)

Cap’n Ezra, Privateer, by James D. Adams. For older children. Illustrated by I. B. Hazelton. (Harcourt.)

1941 In My Mother’s House, by Ann Nolan Clark. For younger children. Illustrated by Velino Herrera. (Viking.)

Pete by Tom Robinson. For middle-age children. Illustrated by Morgan Dennis. (Viking.)

Clara Barton, by Mildren Mastin Pace. For older children. (Scribner.)

1942 Mr. Tootwhistle’s Invention, by Peter Wells. For younger children.
Illustrated by the author. (Winston.)

I Have Just Begun to Fight: The Story of John Paul Jones, by
Commander Edward Ellsberg. For middle-age children. Illustrated
by Gerald Foster. (Dodd.)

None But the Brave, by Rosamond Van der Zee Marshall. For
older children. Illustrated by Gregor Duncan. (Houghton.)

1943 Five Golden Wrens, by Hugh Troy. For younger children. Illus-
trated by the author. (Oxford.)

These Happy Golden Years, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. For middle-
age children. Illustrated by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle.
(Harper-.)

Patterns on the Wall, by Elizabeth Yates. For older children.
(Knopf.)

1944 A Ring and a Riddle, by M. Ilm and E. Segal. For younger children.
Illustrated by Vera Bock. (Lippincott)

They Put Out to Sea, by Roger Duvoisln. For middle-age children.
Illustrated by the author. (Knopf.)

Storm Canvas, by Armstrong Sperry, For older children. Illustrated
by the author. (Winston.)

1945 Little People in a Big Country, by Norma Cohn. For younger children. Illustrated by Tashkent Children’s Art Training Center in Soviet Uzbekistan. (Oxford.)

Gulf Stream by Ruth Brindze. Illustrated by Helene Carter. For middle-age children., (Vanguard.)

Sandy, by Elizabeth Janet Gray. For older children. (Viking.)

1946 Farm Stories. Award divided between Gustaf Tenggren, illustrator, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson, authors. For younger children. (Simon & Schuster.)

The Thirteenth Stone, by Jean Bothwell, illustrated by Margaret Ayer. For middle-age children. (Harcourt)

The Quest of the Golden Condor, by Clayton Knight. Illustrated by the author. For older children. (Knopf.)

Other than The Hobbit and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, has anyone read or reviewed any of these prize-winning books? I know of the authors Jean Bothwell, Elizabeth Janet Grey, Armstrong Sperry, Roger Duvoisin, Elizabeth Yates, John Tunis, and Ann Nolan Clark, but not these particular books of theirs.

Skating With the Statue of Liberty by Susan Lynn Meyer

Nov15

Yesterday I read this 2016 middle grade fiction novel about a twelve year old French Jewish boy named Gustave and his experience of immigrating to the United States during World War II. Because of this book, and yesterday’s review of It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel, and some other upcoming reviews, it seems to have turned into Refugee and Immigrant Week here at Semicolon. It was an unplanned emphasis, but one that is quite apropos considering the news and the times we live in.

In Skating With the Statue of Liberty, Gustave and his extended family come to the United States from war-torn France, after having hidden and then escaped from the Nazis. The family faces many challenges. They are not allowed to bring adequate funds with them to start a new life, and so they are forced to smuggle in what little money they have. No one in the family speaks English, except for Gustave who has learned a little bit of English in school. Gustave’s father can only get a low-paying job as a janitor. Gustave doesn’t understand many things about American culture and customs, and even in America, he faces instances of anti-Semitism and racism as he becomes friends with a “Negro” girl, September Rose.

I read in the book cover blurb that this novel is a companion to the author’s debut novel, Black Radishes. Now I want to go back and read that one because Skating With the Statue of Liberty was a great story. It feels historically accurate, and yet the themes and scenes are quite applicable to the issues of racism and anti-Semitism that we see in the news today. Gustave struggles with whether he should think of himself as French or American or something else, perhaps Jewish. He discusses with a rabbi his lack of faith in a God who would allow the horror and persecution of Jews in German-occupied France. September Rose’s family struggles with how to support their country and the war effort and also stand against the injustice and discrimination that they face as black Americans.

I found this book, by a Jewish author and based partly on her father’s stories of his childhood escape from Nazi-occupied France, to be well-written, historically informative, and absorbing. The plot doesn’t sugarcoat the issues of prejudice, anti-immigrant persecution, discrimination, and even racial and anti-Semitic violence, but the ending and the growing friendship between Gustave and September Rose are hopeful and encouraging.

I just think kids (and adults) need books like this one and like It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel to help them begin to make sense of what is happening politically and socially in our nation. It may have been a coincidence that I read these two books almost back to back, but it gave me an idea to showcase the many really good books about refugees and immigrants that I have read and loved. So that’s what I’ll be doing this week.

The Bomber’s Moon by Betty Vander Els

Mar22

This fictional treatment of missionary children escaping World War II China reads almost like a memoir. In a brief search on the internet, I couldn’t find any information about the author, Betty Vander Els, but I would almost bet that this story is a fictionalized version of her own experiences or those of a very close friend. In the book in 1942 “Ruth”, about eleven years old, and her younger brother, Simeon, are sent away to an emergency boarding school for missionary kids so that they won’t end up in the concentration camp of Weihsien, captured by the approaching Japanese. However, their emergency school site is no safer from Japanese bombing raids than their homes were, and so the children are evacuated over the Himalayas to Calcutta.

The contrast between the children’s petty day-to-day concerns and the enormous events that are happening around them is one focus of this book. Ruth considers herself to be a naughty girl. She gets spanked (or strapped as the book calls it) a lot. But her infractions seem petty and inconsequential, too, for the most part: wandering away from the group, forgetting responsibilities, being disrespectful to teachers. Ruth’s concerns are to survive school and her nemesis, Miss Elson, and to take care of Simeon as her parents have charged her to do. The book paints a vivid picture of what it must have been like to see the war and its effects from a child’s point of view.

Ruth is a bit of an annoying child. She calls Simeon “dope” and “dummy” and “cowardly custard” and other such epithets frequently. She does forget to do her work, and she and her friend Anne play tricks on the teachers and band together to outwit the other children and get their own way. However, at the same time Ruth is quite concerned about taking care of Simeon, and she tries to teach him to be tough and to stand up to hardship. Simeon and his friend, Paul, are both daydreamers and and imaginers who run away, get lost, and find themselves in trouble with alarming frequency. And ever in the background and on the periphery of the children’s lives, there are Japanese bombers, American flyers, Chinese children, and Indian amahs. The setting is both exotic and dangerous, and Ruth and Simeon sashay through all the danger and foreign cultures with style and childlike confidence. In short, they act like children.

There’s a sequel (that I haven’t read) with the same characters called Leaving Point: “Home from boarding school to spend Christmas with their missionary parents, fourteen-year-old Ruth and her brothers find that the Communist Revolution has brought about many changes and new restrictions that complicate Ruth’s growing friendship with a young Chinese girl who may not be what she seems.” (Goodreads)

FDR and the American Crisis by Albert Marrin

Oct18

History professor Albert Marrin has been writing nonfiction narrative history for quite a while: his first book for young adults was Overlord: D Day and the Invasion of Europe, which was published in 1982. He has written more than thirty history narratives for children and young adults, including Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy, a National Book Award finalist.

In his latest book, Marrin returns to the World War II era and to the Great Depression and to the president who shepherded America through both of those crises, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was a complicated character, and Mr. Marrin presents him—warts, strengths, and all—in the context of the events and attitudes of his time. FDR and The American Crisis is, above all, a comprehensive and balanced vision of Roosevelt, what he did for the United States and what he did to change the country, for better and for worse.

In addition to my appreciation for its even-handedness, I was most impressed with the personal tone of Mr. Marrin’s very detailed, yet broad, narrative. Mr. Marrin is 79 years old. Born in 1936, he actually remembers some of the events of Roosevelt’s presidency and of the second World War. And he’s not afraid to gently insert himself into the narrative with an “I remember” or a “we all wonder if” statement. In addition, Marrin isn’t reluctant to share his own informed opinion when it’s appropriate:

“Critics branded Hoover a ‘do-nothing’ president who let Americans suffer due to his commitment to old-fashioned ideas. It is untrue.”

“The media developed a teenager’s crush on the Red Army.”

“Convinced of his own virtue and wisdom, he (FDR) thought too highly of his personal charm and powers of persuasion. He misjudged the murderous Stalin.”

“Those who praised him (FDR) as a saintly miracle worker are as wrong as those who bitterly cursed him as a monster.”

Bottom line, I learned a lot from reading FDR and the American Crisis—and I learned it in a throughly pleasant and absorbing read. Mr. Marrin once said in an interview, “Kids are very bright. I’m not going to write down. If anything, I’ll have them read up to me.” This book is not dumbed down, nor is it a breezy hagiography of a famous president. Any high school, or even college, student looking for both an in-depth and readable introduction to FDR and his presidency could not do better than to read Mr. Marrin’s book first.