Name: Franklin and Winston
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375432286

Jon Meacham

Examines the complex relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and its influence on the course of World War II, examining their individual attempts to manange and influence each other.

An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

Franklin and Winston

Examines the complex relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and its influence on the course of World War II, examining their individual attempts to manage and influence each other.

An Intimate Portrait Of An Epic Friendship

Franklin And Winston

Jeni Enjaian

I loved this book. It was absolutely fascinating. Meacham expertly split his narrative between Franklin and Winston, a task that's not easy to do. It made me more than eager to read the Last Lion. (I'm currently on the reserve list at the library for two of the three volumes.) I would love to be able to write a better review but I have only one thing left in my notes. (That's what I get for not writing the reviews right away.) I finished the book with the thought of just how striking the connection between Roosevelt and Stalin was. It made me think of what might have happened had Roosevelt lived long enough to see the reveal of Stalin's true nature.

The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history's towering leaders Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of the Greatest Generation. In [this volume, the author] explores the ... relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one--a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children. Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR's affections which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides and Winston Churchill. Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history. [In the volume, he] has written [an] account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.-Dust jacket.

Franklin and Winston An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

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