Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After, 1939–1962

In the third and concluding volume of this splendid biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Cook doesn’t have to make a case for her subject. Roosevelt’s life and character do that well enough on their own. If there’s a theme to the volume, it’s the way Roosevelt moved out of her husband’s massive shadow during WWII to live an active, complex, and independent life well before F.D.R.’s death in 1945. All the while, she was part of “one of history’s most powerful and enduring partnerships”—a partnership of “mutual respect and shared commitments”—and she was often F.D.R.’s stand-in, though at other times she was silenced for political or security reasons. Always in Roosevelt’s corner, Cook skillfully weaves her subject’s active and emotional life among friends and family members into the depiction of her public role. The champion of human rights, the anti-Fascist, the foe of anti-Semites, the protector of the ill and infirm, the superb personal diplomat is everywhere in sight, as are Roosevelt’s sometimes-bitter disagreements with, and disappointments in, her husband. If there’s any criticism of this otherwise superb book, it’s that it simply peters out—at the end of these three fine volumes, readers look for and deserve a summation, a rounding-out, and Cook never provides one. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary. (Nov.)