Lessons From History Biographies

  Being a great president requires one to grow when faced with crisis.     There is no shortage of biographies of the famous 20th century president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (aka FDR), and a few of them I have already enjoyed in my personal book collection. However, it was only courtesy of my local used bookstore that I finally caught up with Jean Smith's 2007 massive biographical study of him, and I am quite glad I took the time to do so. Smith paints a compelling portrait of a man who went through great physical suffering, and came out the other end of it a more empathetic and determined leader, one uniquely suited to leading the United States through the great crisis years of the 1930's and 1940's.     FDR's general life details are well known, and Smith recounts them in an in-depth and compelling fashion. Born a child of great wealth and privilege (his parents being deeply embedded in the fashionable wealthy society of Gilded Age America), FDR saw his elderl...

  Ordinary people ignore global events at their own peril.     One great advantage of having a local paperback bookstore is being able to pretty cheaply catch up on popular older books that I missed out on, and over the past few days I breezed through Erik Larson's 2015 bestseller Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania . Larson is a famous example of a "narrative historian," a term historians used to describe a writer who focuses on pleasing the masses. To that end, Larson is willing to write his books in a way that focuses on telling stories and increasing tension, and he's also willing to speculate on people's thoughts and feelings, in ways that make professional historians shudder (as obviously not all that stuff is backed up by solid evidence), but which is fun and generally inoffensive. The sinking of the famous ship Lusitania has become an historical footnote as one of the events that contributed to America joining World War I on the side of the Allie...