The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Mothers, Sons, and Leadership

History has been a male bastion, but the hand that rocked the cradle of famous men like Jefferson and Churchill did rule the world in many if vicarious ways, the authors argue. Mothers, for better or for worse, are enormously influential in their sons' lives. This book, written by a mother of five and one of her daughters (Anne), sets out to document the sometimes little-noted ways male leaders have been shaped by their mothers. Some of them, described here, were mama's boys: Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, F.D.R. Others struggled against possessive mothers: Washington, MacArthur. Many mothers raised their sons virtually by themselves, John D. Rockefeller's and Ronald Reagan's among them. While the merits of motherhood are made clear here, what emerges from the book is a sense of the difficult lives these women led. More documentation of sources and more summary material might have bolstered this ambitious work. October 28