Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok

Edited by Rodger Streitmatter.

This is a comprehensive look at the Eleanor/Hick love relationship, featuring over 300 of their surviving letters to each other (out of 16,000 pages worth!) and helpfully filling in the context of the letters, and writing up what went on whenever the two were together on (frequently inevitably disastrous) vacation trips. The editor admits to focusing on their most significant relationship years of 1933-35 and omitting the duller ones. Things started out well and diminished over the years when Lorena had to quit her beloved career as a reporter over her being "First Friend" and kept trying to find other jobs she didn't hate, and feeling more and more unhappy with that and with not seeing a super busy Eleanor as much. Eleanor thrived on Lorena's admiration, but the more that she got from others/the masses, the less she felt dependent on her. Eleanor ended up financially supporting Lorena a lot. They kept writing and meeting throughout the years, but Eleanor probably felt less after a while. Lorena got another girlfriend for awhile but never got over Eleanor. 

I'll admit I'm not sure if I get the appeal of Hick exactly, but she's a much better writer than Eleanor (then again, she's a professional), as the editor notes that Eleanor pretty much had a format of being schmoopy at the beginning and ending of letters and then being "here's what I did today" in the middle. 

Notable things:

• Eleanor: "No form of love is to be despised." 
• Yes, it sounds like they got laid. And Lorena got gifted with lingerie.
• Lorena (not a fashion plate) reports that someone mistook her for a Girl Scout leader. "My very soul writhes in anguish."
• Every time they got mobbed by the press on vacation, Lorena got pissy. Especially at awful photos. 
• I enjoyed Eleanor snarking that she "suddenly felt like being herself and not like the first lady said several things the first lady shouldn't have said."
• Lorena writes about her travels for her traveling job: "You are now in the drought area." He had hardly got the words out when simultaneously we got a flat tire and it started to pour! Hail, too!" 
• Eleanor gets this absolutely wrong about their upcoming location: "Of course we are going to have a good time together and neither of us is going to be upset." 
• Their 1934 vacation was the worst of many bad ones, in which Lorena just totally lots her shit at reporters, got forced to go camping with a bunch of people who invited themselves along and loved naked cold swimming, fell off her horse into a river, and embarrassed the heck out of Eleanor.
• Eleanor notes that Lorena and Earl Miller "need me more than anyone who things go wrong for neither of us have anyone much nearer to turn to whom I must remember not to offend!" 
• Eleanor considered leaving FDR at one point. 
• Eleanor: "What a nuisance hearts are and yet without them life would hardly be worthwhile!"
• Eleanor felt like she loved Hick just the same even if she wasn't always returning the love in kind.
• Eleanor: "Why can't someone have this job who'd like it and do something worth while with it?"
• Lorena: "But about 90 percent of the time I'm out of step with life and miserable." I hear ya.
• Eleanor: "Last night I had written questions and was asked if I loved my husband, which I did not answer!" 
• "In 1939, they had written each other a daunting 533 letters; by 1944, that figure had plummeted to fifty." 
• "I had 800 ladies to tea to-day. It was awful but I think successful!" -life of Eleanor
• Lorena wrote a biography of Eleanor, but it never found a publisher because it "lacked the breath of life." 

Overall, four stars. If you want a comprehensive dive into this relationship, here it is.

Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life

By Joseph E. Persico.

I think you can figure out the plot and argument behind this one, even though Franklin and Lucy were in off-and-on contact throughout the years, so other things and women turn up, obviously. There's more biography of Lucy's upbringing and mentions of her married life and whatnot.

Fun facts:

• Sara Delano's love of her life was Stanford White, who was notably murdered by Harry K. Thaw. 
• Franklin's older brother was literally named "James Roosevelt Roosevelt" so as to not be named James Roosevelt Jr. Seriously?!
• Quote from young Franklin: "Mommie, if I didn't give the orders, nothing would happen."
• Quote from Grover Cleveland upon meeting 5-year-old Franklin: "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States."
• Franklin graduated from college in 3 years, but hung around campus for another year to run the newspaper. He had two graduations and claimed to be a member of the later class.
• Why was Franklin originally into Eleanor? The family trait of "a deep and abiding interest in everything and everybody."
• A "typical" journal entry of Alice: "RETALIATE! REVENGE! RETALIATION!"
• Alice seems to kinda hate and kinda like Eleanor a lot? Very confusing. Eleanor both admired Alice and was afraid of her. Sounds legit.
• Alice tried to explain "the facts of life" to Eleanor before her wedding, having watched her pet rabbits and guinea pigs. Eleanor tried to smother her with a pillow.
• Eleanor's sex talk to her own daughter: "Sex, my dear, is something a woman must learn to endure." 
• Franklin "certainly kept Eleanor steadily pregnant before 1915...."
• Lucy met the Roosevelts when working for them. After Eleanor fired her for obvious reasons, she went out and got a job working for Franklin at his Navy office. So....yeah, that worked well.
• How did the Roosevelts economize in wartime? Skipping the bacon, 2 course lunches and 3 course dinners.
• "Cousin Alice asked Eleanor how she might help. She showed up at Union Station twice, then disappeared. Pouring coffee and handing out sandwiches had afflicted her with what she called "canteen elbow."
• "Alice's idea of helping the war effort involved recruiting Franklin in a mad spy caper." "All I was being asked to do was to look over transoms and peep through keyholes," she recalled. "Could anything be more delightful than that?" Franklin was enlisted to set a trap by providing phony classified documents concerning ship movements to be carefully left about May's house."
• Alice: "Franklin deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor." She constantly did imitations of Eleanor even long after she was dead. "Both Eleanor and Franklin could be very boring together."
• Alice catches her so-called friend Cissy fucking her husband. "Finding hairpins in the library, Alice sent them to Cissy with a note, "I believe these are yours." Cissy wrote back, "And if you look up in the chandelier, you might find my panties."
• Franklin's son James claims Franklin took Lucy to a motel overnight, except motels didn't exist then and there's no evidence of this. The author notes that James needed money and was always doing stupid get-rich-quick schemes. 
• Lucy SOMEHOW later got fired from her job, ahem. 
• Franklin wanted a divorce, but his mommy wouldn't let him and threatened to cut him off financially if he did. So much for that. Also that would have killed his political career. "Practicality and economics are the death of romance." Franklin broke up with Lucy. 
• Squick: "Father, I think, thought of Missy as another of his children," though a distinction might be drawn between a child sitting on a man's lap and his secretary doing so." EWWW.
• "When an interviewer asked Anna point-blank "whether father was having an affair with Missy" she answered, "Who could tell?" 
• "In plain English, he could sustain an erection."
• Missy's various breakdowns most likely were brought on by finding out that Franklin was still in contact with Lucy. They were secretly corresponding and a stash of letters was found by her granddaughters. 
• Eleanor: "As it turned out Franklin's children were more my mother-in-law's children than they were mine." Ouch.
• Eleanor used to be pretty racist, but when she met more people of different ethnicities, she chilled out on that topic. 
• More from James Roosevelt on Missy: "Elliot makes a lot of Missy being seen entering or leaving father's room in her nightclothes, but was she supposed to dress to the teeth every time she was summoned at midnight?....None of us thought anything of it." Her bedroom was right next door....with an adjoining doorway to Franklin's...
• Franklin wrote some smartassed remarks to a misspelled letter: "I cannot walk without a cain because I am not abel" and "We all have to watch our step with so many prohibition agents around" and "My principal pain in the neck is when I get letters like this." 
• "It was a triangle of mutual advantage. Franklin gave Missy her reason for being. Missy provided the adoring female companionship that Franklin required. And his dependence on Missy freed Eleanor to pursue the life she wanted." 
• I'll be getting into this with another book, but in 1978 a woman named Doris Faber went to the Roosevelt Library and found all the romantic letters between Eleanor and Lorena Hickok and asked to see the director and asked him to embargo the letters for several decades to save her the dilemma of what she should make of it all. The director decided to leave the collection open. 
• One maid reported that "Eleanor kissed everyone" and found it funny when people went on about Eleanor and Hick kissing. 
• Hick moved into the White House but frequently pretended she was just a visitor, and the doormen/ushers had to pretend along. One time someone asked her, "In residence today? Or just a visitor?"
• Eleanor asked Franklin to read Gone With The Wind and put it by his bedside. He'd read it through by the next morning. JEEBUS CHRIST AND HERE I THOUGHT I WAS A SPEED READER. Was he up ALL night with that one?
• Franklin had a "miniature pig collection." 
• "We really had two mistresses in the White House." "Missy was the substitute wife." "The staff had originally been perplexed by what appeared to be a four-way domestic arrangement." 
• Eleanor: "He couldn't have lived without me, but neither could he have lived without Missy."
• Both Franklin and Eleanor wanted to write novels about people who were fed up with their marriage. 
• Even though Dorothy Schiff regarded Franklin as a "sun god," she noticed he never asked about her or was interested in her. "He was interested in himself, and having what he thought was this well-dressed young woman who he could ramble on to." Of his various sorta-girlfriends, she seems the least into him.
• Upon swearing being sworn in for his third term, Roosevelt whispered to the chief justice, "I don't know how you feel about this, but I'm getting sick of it." 
• Franklin sucked at dealing with his supposed loved ones getting sick: "He was turned off by people who could no longer fit into his game." He just kinda....coolly blocked off unpleasantness like his favorite people becoming too ill to be what he wanted. Oy. That said, Franklin did plan on leaving Missy half of his estate to take care of her had he died before her, disinheriting his kids. 
• More Franklin on reading: "Asked by a reporter if he had read Kathleen Winsor's racy 1944 best-seller, Forever Amber, he answered, "Only the dirty parts." 
• "Roosevelt, in contrast, treats all problems impersonally as if they had no organic relation to him--people the same way. Otherwise he could not have stood three terms in office." 
• Cousin Polly Delano, everybody! "After the first lady met Churchill, the only thing Polly wanted to know was whether he was sexy. Eleanor answered wearily, "I just don't know, Polly, I just don't know." 
• Uh.....there was going to be "a cast of polio patients to perform a blackface minstrel show for him." OH DEAR LORD I CAN'T. This is on the day Franklin died. "The performers, stunned, hung about the playhouse, weeping, their grief incongruous in their painted faces and clown costumes of pink shirts, green vests, white pants, huge orange cardboard neckties, and pie-sized buttons." 
• Daisy Suckley on the Roosevelts: "The fact that they could not relax together, or play together, is the tragedy of their joint lives, for I believe, from everything that I have seen of them, that they had everything else in common." 
• Poor Anna Roosevelt: felt like she had to give in and aid and abet her dad in sneaking around because he was dying, got caught after he died.
• On Eleanor and all of her romantic friendships: "She was the third person with Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman. And then there was Joe Lash and Trude, and Mrs. Roosevelt was the third person in that relationship. Then there was David and Edna, and again she was the third person. Mrs. Roosevelt was always the loving outsider." 
• "Historians might debate the ranking of the greatest presidents, but among eminent American women, Eleanor Roosevelt almost invariably ranks first." 
• "But Mrs. Roosevelt, don't you think people love you for yourself?" "No, dear, I don't." 

Hey, it was dishy. Four stars. 

Herbert Hoover

By William E. Leuchtenburg.

See, now THIS is how you write a short presidential biography of a not-so-good president! Take note, authors of Benjamin Harrison and especially William McKinley! This is choice! This is good stuff! This is exactly what I want out of a presidential biography! What's good about this one? You definitely get a sense of what the guy was like and what he did and why he did what he did. This guy is generally kind of a dour turd, but also has his good points, and you sort of wonder in a sense why his good side didn't exactly help with regards to having to deal with the Great Depression.

Opening quote of the book: "Writing about Herbert Hoover is like trying to describe the interior of a citadel where every drawbridge is up and every porticullis down." -George Creel.

This made me concerned at how dull this was likely to be, but darned if the author didn't make it work! 

Hoover facts and moments:

• He was raised Quaker and orphaned as a child, basically having no fun whatsoever and growing up hungry. The author chalks this up to developing the good and bad points of his personality (workhorse, not showing, self-reliant, trusting the community to help the needy, good works, peaceful), but he rebelled later on and "smoked, drank, swore, danced, patronized the theater, and profaned the Sabbath. Of Quakerism, he remarked, "I never worked very hard at it."
• Hoover eventually made it to Stanford in California, and California was basically heaven for him. (As a native, I agree.) Unfortunately, even for a Stanford grad he was a horrible speller and writer, with his writing described as "like balls of glue dropped from a rooftop." "After repeatedly failing to satisfy an English requirement, he disposed of it only because a science professor mopped up his punctuation and grammar." 
• "He never ceased to believe his country was the greatest nation on earth; that Westerners, especially Californians, were the most gifted of Americans; and that finest of all were Stanford men." "On that campus he found acceptance, he found his metier, he found his future wife, he almost found himself."  Hoover went into geology. 
• Personalitywise, he was dour, unsmiling, untalking, not into eye contact, super blunt, and awkward. (Guess what we'd probably assume he's got these days.) However, he became somewhat of a BMOC for hating fraternities, and insisting on not being paid while being class treasurer. "He was without humor and, so far as anyone could tell, without emotion." He "felt like a wet crow" at parties and grunted a lot.
• However, he would celebrate holidays, hide eggs, dress up as Santa, etc. He sent home a lot of money to needy friends and relatives, by stealth. He was a generous guy, privately.
• Brand Whitlock said he "has a genius for organization and for getting things done, and beneath it all, with his great intelligence...has a wonderful human heart." Of course, later the same guy calls him "What a bully! He would even bully a poor exiled King!" 
• He became a trustee of Stanford and got a lot of things done, "almost every reform we have dreamed of has slipped through as if oiled." He also got salary raises for assistant professors, as well as a lot of new buildings. 
• Hoover worked overseas for a lot of years, which he didn't like. He did great careerwise and moneywise (became a multimillionaire), was a hard boss, and uh, liked "correcting the perversities and incompetence of men."  He would disappear from his family for long periods, "having learned nothing from his own painful childhood." He blamed others when things went wrong, didn't like any criticism, was compared to a volcano, insisted on having his own way and threw shit fits if he didn't get it. "He can express himself so accurately and so indignantly that his victim will go off nursing a grudge for the rest of his natural life." 

How did this super pleasant guy manage to get married when I can't? Just asking, universe.

• Hoover wrote a lot of books, with terrible writing and spelling. 
• "It has got to be recognized by everybody...that I am the boss, and that any attempts to minimize the importance of my leadership would do...infinite harm," said he. "Many who had dealings with Hoover found him chilling." 
• He was freaking great during WW1, working with all kinds of countries. He was extremely good at keeping people fed. 
• "Though Hoover was seeking office as nominee of a major political party, he did not want to be mistaken for a politician. He dreaded hitting the campaign trail." "Hoover had only one liability: he seemed to be a cold fish." "Not even Coolidge, a legendary sourpuss, could abide Hoover's ill nature." One writer asked, "Is Hoover Human?" Good question.
• However, "for many he was, despite his lack of magnetism, heroic." Hence his winning the presidency.
• Even Hoover himself said "If some unprecedented calamity should come upon the nation...I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who expected too much."
• His wife: "If you want to get the gloomiest view of any subject on earth, ask Bert about it."
• "The president had no sense of how to reach out to a desperate nation." 
• Hoover opposed any sort of dole and claimed that nobody actually starved. He was more concerned with the government running a deficit and wanted tax increases and cuts in government spending. He only got into the idea of mobilizing the national government because he had lost faith in bankers and had run out of other options for sources of credit. 
• In 1932, war veterans were attacked in the streets by the government. FDR on this topic: "Well, this elects me."
• Another quote: "If the election were held tomorrow, any Democratic candidate who had not been convicted of anything more than rape or murder would defeat Mr. Hoover."
• While on the campaign trail, people tried to pull spikes out of the railroad ties and/or blow him up with dynamite. Someone sent him a telegram saying "Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous."
• In 1928 some parents named their kid "Herbert Hoover Jones," and five years later petitioned the court to change it to "Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones" so as to relieve him from chagrin and mortification. 
• Hoover thought Roosevelt had "comparatively little vision." You know nothing, Herbert Hoover.
• During the lame duck period, Hoover wrote "Roosvelt" (he can't spell) a ten page letter lecturing him and telling him what to say. Roosevelt ignored it. Later while at tea, Hoover kept it up to the point where FDR said that he was sure his son Jimmy wanted to punch him in the eye. 
• Hoover basically sucked and was hated until the Truman administration, when Truman recruited him to help with the worldwide food crisis, saying that nobody else in the country could do that job. 

The wit and wisdom of Herbert Hoover, who finally developed a sense of humor in his old age:

• "I'm the only person of distinction who's ever had a depression named after him."
• "When his niece revealed that she did not know how to cope with speakers who ran on and on, Hoover told her: "You just pass them up a little note and you just write on it "your fly is open" and he'll sit down right away."
• "Asked how he managed to endure the many years when leaders of both parties treated him as a pariah, he replied, "I outlived the bastards."
• "He labored on a history of FDR and the New Deal so unbalanced that--to protect Hoover's reputation--it has been hidden away. On one occasion, asked what he was doing in the middle of the night, he retorted, "I'm making my Roosevelt book more pungent." 
• "He was so hard of hearing that his secretaries had to shout. That was all right, Hoover told a visitor. "I'm used to being hollered at." 

Four stars. Excellent job on this particular topic! I waited with great delight for more pungent comments and quotes every other page and was not disappointed. 

Woodrow Wilson

By Louis Auchincloss.

Okay, this is an improvement from the last book. What was my impression of Wilson? Sexist, wants female attention, really obsessed with the League of Nations, getting into a feud with his bestie, having a stroke. There you go.

Notable moments in the book:

• His wife Edith was hiding as best she could how badly her husband was doing, claiming that he'd said yes or no to whatever and nobody would know the difference. But I about threw up when I read this sentence: "Her excuse that she had no interest in the president of the United States but only in her husband was less that of a free American woman than of a Hindu wife who has no obligation to society beyond that of her duty to her lord and master, ending with that of throwing herself on his funeral pyre." THE FUCK?!?!
• Post-big stroke, Wilson was doing super terribly both physically and mentally. He'd had two before "and though in each case his recovery had seemed complete, there is evidence that these strokes took some toll on his temperament. We shall see that there were always two Woodrow Wilsons, and that the tragedy of his bad health understandably contributed to the lesser and not the greater of the two." 
• He was racist, or "he never quite shook off the condescending southern attitude towards blacks." The author passes it off as "nine out of ten men raised as he was would have thought the same." Oy.
• He was reserved and shy and picky in who he liked, so gee, somehow he didn't have a lot of friends.
• That said, he was actually a very popular professor (as in, voted most so! frequently!) and would do comic impersonations at parties. 
• He had a flirtation with a married lady, Mary Peck, while also married. Maybe went all the way? 
• "He could appear to be two different men, the one scarcely aware of what the other was thinking."
• "If we find it hard at times to understand the two sides of Wilson's nature, it may be helpful to remember that he had the same difficulty."
• Wilson was brokenhearted when his first wife died, then fell in love again within a year, something that other people found distasteful. 
• More talk about Edith that made me want to vomit: "She worshiped him as the great man of his era and saw her role as one of constant and unquestioning support, a kind of priestess at the alar of a deity."
• This was published in 2000 and the author takes some time to make some cracks about impeachment.
• Wilson was going to make 30 major speeches...and then had the big stroke. Oy. 
• Wilson also pretty much went mental after the stroke, insisting that the Secret Service chase after drivers who passed him, firing the secretary of state for holding meetings, etc. 
• The author would like to blame Edith and the doctor for what went on with the league, apparently?
• Edith claimed that the doctor warned her that every time she took a problem to her husband, "you are turning a knife in an open wound" and she should solve things without her husband. "It seems to me most unlikely that a doctor would have taken it on himself to give such drastic advice where the governance of the nation was at stake; at any rate he was conveniently dead when Edith saw fit to make public his alleged recommendation." 

I dunno, this is kind of a dicey book and skeevy towards Edith (did she deserve it? I dunno, but I felt icky), but at least it had some more personality? Two and a half stars. 

William McKinley

By Kevin Phillips.

This was literally the worst presidential biography I have ever read. Seriously, I thought Benjamin Harrison was pretty dull, but that was a roller coaster ride of excitement compared to THIS.

From the book:

"Who really was he? What did he achieve? Why didn't I have a fuller picture--and what forces had led him to being so widely and unfairly dismissed?"

We'll cover that one below.

"McKinley was no Washington or Lincoln. This portrait will describe an upright and effective president of the solid second rank. His insistence on making friends, orchestrating consensus, and avoiding acrimony probably bars him from the first rank."

Um....none of that sounds....bad? Or preventing one from being first rank? I mean, really, if we're ranking presidents, usually the top ones are the ones who had to deal with the worst crises and dealt with them pretty successfully. It doesn't sound like McKinley had massive drama going on during his term to really test his mettle. 

It sounds like the problem with writing about McKinley is that he didn't leave a whole lot of personality/paperwork behind him (same issue with say, Martin Van Buren) and was a stoic personality. There's not much you can say about him personally at all to get a sense of the dude, which is definitely a problem in writing a biography of the guy. So the book almost entirely focuses on the issues of the day, which were frankly uninteresting to read about and not super controversial to me reading about them now. The crack I made about tariffs in Benjamin Harrison? Very much true here. I was super super bored. 

The most interesting fact about McKinley from this book is that his wife became handicapped and when she started having convulsions at the dinner table he'd throw a napkin over her face. I...do not know what to make of this at all. It is mentioned later that he would carry her out at times as well, which sounds more reasonable than just pitching fabric over her face in public. 

He also received honorary doctorates from two women's colleges, which is nice, and he told people that "I am glad that we are demonstrating in the United States today that the boy should have no more advantage than the girl." This is compared to Cleveland, who said that "the relative positions of men and women were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence." I do not look forward to eventually reading about Cleveland. This book also goes on for a few pages about the "mugwumps" (WHY THE HELL DID ANYONE DECIDE TO CALL THEMSELVES THIS, it's worse than "Whigs," even) and what they were for and how they were sexist. Whee. 

I will also note that THIS IS A PRESIDENT WHO GOT ASSASSINATED. Why did he get assassinated? By whom, and when? What was the story? I HAVE NO IDEA FROM READING THIS BOOK BECAUSE THE AUTHOR BARELY MENTIONS THAT THE GUY DIED AT ALL. His murderer and/or the motives or how it happened or ANYTHING are completely skipped in favor of musing over Theodore Roosevelt and figuring out McKinley's legacy and trying to compare him to the greats and figuring out how he's second tier. Seriously?! I was so bored reading this, but at least I had a murder to look forward to to jazz it up a bit* and we don't even get THAT because...why? That was news. That was important. Why the heck did you skip this as much as you possibly could in a biography? 

* I'm being snarky on "jazz it up a bit," but seriously, I was curious about the assassination after reading all the crazy details of Garfield's, and I don't even remember what this book review said about McKinley's at this point. I need to reread it. On a related note, I read up on Garfield and Arthur back in the day and I canNOT find the written reviews here, the hell? 

This is a snooze to read and not recommended. One star. 

In other news, I recently got a copy of Assassination Vacation (previously read as a library book) and started rereading it and that was FAR better and more interesting regarding McKinley. 

Benjamin Harrison

By Charles W. Calhoun.

Now that the Turd Administration is over with, I decided to go back to reading presidential biographies, a project I originally started back in 2016 and mostly quit after Arthur for ... obvious election reasons depressing me. Anyway, while I couldn't find a Cleveland biography at the nearest library to me these days (I don't feel arsed to hit the nearby college library like I used to for these things), I did pick up several "American Presidents" books again for the presidents one doesn't want to spend too much time reading about. Hence, Benjamin Harrison.

Lordy, this is a fairly boring book. It has moments here and there, but man, both Benjamin and the period of time his presidency was in were bo-ring. I started making lists of "you know a presidential biography is boring when they talk about tariffs a LOT" and "you know a presidential biography is boring when they start talking about how hard it is to build a cabinet and lists everyone in it" (Team of Rivals being the one book that's interesting in that regard....though Andrew Jackson's feuding first Cabinet comes next) and "you know a presidential biography is boring when they just list names of everyone living in the house." Benjamin was also a born-again Christian, so he's boring in that regard too. Even Benjamin thought other people thought he was a bore (page 22). 

The ongoing mystery in this book is "why did he lose after 4 years when Henry Adams thought he was an excellent president?" "He succeeded too well," the author concludes on page 4. ???? Also, Benjamin wasn't too into patronages, and that pissed people right off during the Gilded Age. Also, his wife died right before the election, which is sad.

Anyway: Christian, got married young, did some military time, is William Henry Harrison's grandson, won the election. Unlike his grandfather, he smartly wore a "chamois undersuit" to his rainy inauguration. He also had hordes of his relatives move in--I note that his son-in-law avoided the house and his brother-in-law, it felt like the author was trying to stir up a bit of drama.

Harrison was the kind of guy to do other people's work, wrote his own speeches and prepared his own papers, and filled in for his absent cabinet members. He was also sensible enough to not just accept whoever wanted a patronage for what without investigating it first. He was formal and cold to most people unless he knew them well. He took in his ill secretary, and personally gave CPR (or whatever they called it then) to the navy secretary when his house burned down and let him move in too. 

And then he had to deal with James Blaine. It's been like five years since I read about this time period, but I thought, "Wasn't Blaine a pain in the ass?" Why yes, yes, he was to everyone. The family was kind of snooty and fake, and Blaine called out sick a lot. Blaine was both the sort who was genuinely frequently ill AND was also likely to "call out sick" and who knows which one he'd be doing. At one point Blaine was expected to give a speech, then he didn't show up, and Benjamin "did not learn the subject of his banquet toast until he sat down at the table and read it in the program." Good thing he improvised well! 

Benjamin on Native Americans: still thought that "civilizing" them was the way and anyone with complaints should register them "peacefully" with the government. Ooookay then. On the other hand, he supported African-American rights enough that Frederick Douglass--who as I recall was buds with Lincoln--declared that "to my mind, we never had a greater President."

Benjamin didn't enjoy the job, and god knows he didn't miss it after he was out of it, but felt chagrined at being voted out, a bit. 

I'll note that Benjamin's wife Carrie/Caroline had a young widowed niece, Mame Dimmick, who comes up in this book a LOT a lot a lot, moves in and "looks after" Benjamin. Foreshadowing, she becomes wife #2! Nothing at all creepy about that, amirite? Uh, Benjamin's daughter sure thought it was, and she and her family made a break from this drama. Can't say I blame her.

Anyway, I'm going to give this two stars. Not sure if it's dull due to the guy, the times, or the author, but for a short read that took me a few hours, it was a dullish few hours. 

 

 

Franklin and Eleanor

By Hazel Rowley.

Well, this is certainly interesting and is fairly blatant about what went on in that relationship!

This is a duel biography of the Roosevelts, focusing on relationships rather than the politics. It especially focuses on how roughly halfway(?) through the marriage, Franklin cheated on Eleanor with Lucy Mercer. Even though there doesn't seem to be any formal announcements of "that's it, we're living separate romantic lives" mentioned, that's clearly what happened. 

Now, I've always rather liked the Roosevelts. Other than the internment camps* FDR has always sounded like a top good president, and Eleanor as the best first lady, and Roosevelts in general tend to be fascinating people. But in addition to FDR being "first obviously handicapped president, managed to get elected a bunch of times and fight a world war while dealing with that," and Eleanor being "first bisexual first lady, that we know of anyway," I feel like they may be the most famous old-timey polyamorous couple before polyamory became A Thing. 

• He's probably done some other things that aren't great too, just can't think of any and I haven't read any super involved books on his presidency yet.

I like to make this joke about the Roosevelts: "he had a girlfriend, she had a girlfriend...." In reality, he seems to have had tons of girlfriends--I think I've lost track of 'em all-- and Eleanor had both girlfriends and boyfriends! Now, while we don't know how many of those actually involved sex--I think we can be pretty sure that Lucy Mercer and Lorena Hickok definitely got laid (and I just got some library books on both of those ladies to check!), but anyone else I think is a giant question mark-- the word "romantic friendship" comes up a lot, a lot a lot a lot. I'm not sure if FDR was literally up for boning after getting polio, but he certainly had a lot of lady friends hanging around/working for him/shacking up with/* kind of a harem? going on? Which Eleanor knew about and was pretty much friends with everybody.** Likewise, it seems pretty open secret that Eleanor hung out with lesbians*** and FDR was absolutely cool with it and befriended her girlfriends. Eleanor also seems to have had several "passionate friendships" with dudes as well. Very intriguing! Even Lewis Howe, FDR's best politics guy, seems to have been on close, platonic terms with both of them. I'm not sure what to call that particular dynamic, but it sounds very nice. 

• Seriously, he shacked up with Missy for years and kept making promises to do so with other ladies.
• * Except for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who everyone was totally threatened by when she came back into FDR's life.
• ** Eleanor also definitely shacked up with some of her people. Repeatedly.

In general, Team Roosevelt sounds like it was very nice people to work for! My impression is that their employees loved them and they sound charismatic (especially FDR) as heck.

In addition to dealing with politics, illness, kids, and revolving doors of inamoratas and inamoratos, there's also Sara Delano Roosevelt, a My Beloved Smother if ever there was one. FDR has always struck me as being a very stereotypical Aquarius guy: loves his friends, doesn't love having emotions, likes having a lot of people around, wants to be detached. This probably helped him a great deal with regards to being the only child of a smothering mom with a lot of money and not much else to do in life but focus on him, in that he doesn't sound super upset about dealing with her shit. But poor Eleanor: grows up an orphan, suddenly has a smother-mother, starts out being friendly and appeasing, and then the older she gets, the less and less fucks she gives. That's gratifying to hear about.

Okay, so list of memorable things:

• Eleanor's bisexuality sounds like it was going on early, as a lot of girls at her girls' school had crushes on her and were giving her flowers. That's nice.
• Franklin and his urge to get married early: "Marriage was his only chance for sexual fulfillment. It would also mean freedom from his mother."
• Franklin had some kind of secret code in case his mother snooped through his papers. "Cryptologists have cracked the code, but not the meaning," whatever THAT last bit means. For the record: it substituted numbers for vowels and deleted the tops or bottoms of consonants.
• Previous to Eleanor, Franklin dated Alice Sohier, who reported that he was ah, very fresh. "Franklin had to be slapped--hard." Alice refused his proposal, as he wanted six children and "I did not wish to be a cow."
• Franklin knew how to manipulate his mom to want to go to Europe. "I really want you to tell me what you would want me to do," he wrote, claiming it'd be good for him, but he didn't want to be away from her and he wouldn't want to go unless she could decide not to care, and it would be so selfish of him.... He got to go. 
• Of course his mother wasn't happy to hear he'd proposed to anyone, and asked him to keep the engagement secret for a year. However, his mother had all the money. Eventually Franklin stands up to mummy and she backs down. 
• "Franklin was used to his mother, and had long ago chosen his way of dealing with her--lies, evasion, and feigned docility." 
• Franklin didn't exactly bother to hide his affection for Lucy Mercer, even around his relatives. Alice Roosevelt kept asking Franklin and Lucy to dinner together (she haaaaaaaaaaated Eleanor) and tried to hint to Eleanor's face what was going on. Eleanor ignored this. 
• Wow, did Roosevelt's doctor ever straight up lie to the press, claiming "you can say definitely that he will not be crippled." Louis Howe talked him into saying that, and then at the same time sent some letter "allegedly" from Franklin to the publisher of the NYT claiming he had doubts about that. 
• Louis Howe's wife Grace apparently told him that she hated him and that she loathed his touch. OUUUUUCH. She accused him of having an affair with Eleanor and he pointed out those facts to her. He then claims they're just friends and "Do you want me to give that up too? So many things you don't want--what is there that you do?" Geez, lady. You don't want him but you won't let anyone else have him either? 
• Even when recently paralyzed, Franklin's vibing with his nurse, Enda Rockey. And his secretary, Missy LeHand. 
• For years, Franklin is shacking up with Missy, taking her on a houseboat, to cottages, White Springs, the White House.... "If the adoring Missy could help him feel like a man again, Eleanor was not going to complain." While on the boat, "all wander round in pyjamas, nighties, and bathing suits!" Also, "Missy was willing to put up with cold nights, seasickness, sunburn, mosquitos, and hours of vain rod-holding in order to be with Franklin." "Vain rod-holding?!" snicker
• "If he was going to get back into political life he would have to be able to walk." Louis Howe was quite the engineer: figuring that being handicapped would cancel out Franklin's being an aristocrat. But he should never be photographed in the wheelchair or ever be seen being carried. "The public knew that Franklin Roosevelt had polio, but it was generally believed that he had recovered his ability to walk." He had to be seen upright, on crutches.
• Eleanor's first lesbians were a couple, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, who joined the Roosevelt inner circle/"gang." Everyone mutually adored each other, but the extended family was horrified. Franklin offered to build the ladies (all three of 'em) their own house on his land to live in together. 
• Twenty years in/halfway through the marriage and "By now it was clear to all their friends that Franklin and Eleanor were no longer a traditional couple. They had independent lives, which involved other close companions." 
• "One of the things that gave Franklin the most satisfaction was to provide the opportunity for people to do what they did best... While everyone in the group relied on everyone else, they also opened up each other's horizons. Franklin approved of this kind of bold social arrangement."
• Eleanor by now has crawled out of her shell, doesn't want to go back in, and "Eleanor had finished with trying to please Mama."
• Mama hates everything that's going on--Louis, Missy, Eleanor no longer being meek, Franklin being handicapped and trying to get back into politics--so she lords it over the grandchildren instead. Franklin just tells all the kids to figure it out with Granny. Eleanor gripes about Mama's "side slaps" and "we'd like to chew her up." 
• Franklin straight up calls Val-Kill, the house built for Eleanor/Nancy/Marion, a "love nest." "Franklin was taking a subversive delight in Eleanor's new life." Eleanor embroiders all their initials on the towels and linens. Mama hates it. "Mama did not dare to drop in without an invitation."
• Marion was the crankier one and at one point gets the idea that Franklin's not going to pay for the swimming hole. He basically writes back along the lines of, where did this come from, I adore y'all, and "If I had you here I would spank you both and then kiss you." eyebrow raised
• "Franklin had Warm Springs; Eleanor had Val-Kill. Franklin had Missy; Eleanor had Nancy and Marion. Both had Louis Howe." POLYAMORY!!!!
• "Franklin was away from home for 116 weeks between 1925 and 1928. His mother was with him for two of these; Eleanor for four; Missy for 110. There is never a hint of complaint in Eleanor's letters to Franklin." She accepted that one person could not fulfill every need. 
• Franklin's speechwriter, Sam Rosenman: "Roosevelt loved people, and they learned quickly to return that affection... He was not concerned with distinctions of wealth or special position or religious beliefs. This was a new kind of man in politics for me: one who did not seem to care--or even know--whether you were a Catholic, Protestant or Jew."
• Poor Missy: once Franklin becomes governor, she can't obviously be alone with him. Move into the mansion, he says! 
• "FDR often referred to himself as "Father." He liked to think of the community around him as a big, happy family." POLYAMORY!
• "Even when he was president of the United States, arguably the most powerful man in the world, FDR would still have to go to his mother with his cap in hand."
• Another one of Eleanor's romantic friendships: Earl Miller, family bodyguard. Franklin liked him. Louis/Marion/Nancy sound jealous. Even James Roosevelt suspected his mother of having an affair with Earl. The author assumes it didn't get sexual since Earl preferred younger women. We'll never know, since most of their letters were burned. But at one point, Earl and Missy dated!...until he decided to marry a teenager instead. Earl claimed he dated Missy to fend off gossip and that's why he married someone he didn't love, too. 
• Louis Howe could be very blunt when he didn't like what Franklin wanted to do. Overheard one day: "You're going for a swim? Well, go ahead, dammit, and I hope to God you drown!" 
• Sam Rosenman and his wife move into the governor's mansion at FDR's request. "Dorothy and I knew the gossip about Missy and FDR and tried to figure out what that relationship was." "The Rosenmans remained as mystified as everyone else." A friend of Eleanor's claimed there was no affair. "He loves Missy. She's quite essential to him....But as to an affair--no."
• "By accepting Missy into the household as if it went without saying, Eleanor provided a cover. Her friends, just like Franklin's, knew not to add fuel to the endless gossip. Meanwhile, Eleanor's relationship with her bodyguard was also causing tongues to wag."
• Meet Lorena Hickok, obvious lesbian and "nation's foremost female political journalist." Imagine the awkwardness of her dating the first lady with regards to her job.... she could report on all this dirt, but.... Louis Howe on the topic: "A reporter should never get too close to the news source." She had to give up her job and get a new one. When she was at the White House, they "snipped" her out of photos. I
• Eleanor didn't give a crap about the gossip. 
• Hick, however, wasn't too happy in the relationship after awhile, specifically after Eleanor became first lady and was obviously very busy with that. 
• "There were to be no pictures depicting the president's handicap. It was not permitted to photograph FDR in his wheelchair. If his braces could be seen at the bottom of his trousers, the photos were to be retouched." They could do that then?!? "There was no television in those days, of course, and all newsreel coverage of FDR was carefully orchestrated. FDR was shown standing, he was shown sitting; Early did not permit cameras to show FDR "walking." From today's perspective, it is astounding that the press stuck to the rules. Even journalists who disliked Roosevelt respected the dignity of a handicapped man.... The limitations on press coverage of FDR were so effective that for twelve long years, most Americans had no idea that their president could not walk." 
• FDR had no qualms about inviting people into his bathroom while he shaved or got dressed. "Take a seat on the can," he would tell them cheerfully." 
• The White House food during the Roosevelts' time there was notoriously bad. (She reminds me of Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School, in which we find out that the notoriously terrible school cook, Miss Mush, is actually really good at it if she only has to cook for a few people. The more she has to cook for, the worse she gets.) 
• How FDR stayed calm: "Once you've spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion." 
• Elliott Roosevelt said that for all his mother's writings, "she managed to conceal her personality completely....We read her articles and marveled how she created the image of a total stranger, not the detached, harried, fault-finding wife and parent we knew." 
• In one of her books, Eleanor used the word "darky," having no idea it was derogatory and the ah...presumably white people who read the book before publication didn't notice. When an African-American lady wrote to share her offense, Eleanor apologized and asked what she preferred instead. Nice. 
• More girlfriends of Franklin: Daisy Suckley, who kept a journal of all of this stuff for posterity, and Dorothy Schiff.  The latter doesn't sound like she was all that into him and didn't sleep with him, though she said she probably would have had he asked. And then there's Crown Princess Marthe, who FDR offer to put up at his house. She sounds like an admiring teenage giggler, somehow, even though she had 3 kids.
• Eleanor ends up having a nasty breakup with Marion and Nancy after Nancy says everything they all did together was to build up Eleanor. Eleanor cut them off after that, saying she'd be cordial since they lived next door, but that was it. Nancy regretted it and she and Marion went to Franklin for aid, but it doesn't sound like he wanted to assist at that point, and we're told that "he, like all of Eleanor's friends, took the view that Marion and Nancy had abused Eleanor's goodwill over the years." 
• I'm not sure if this counts as "romantic friendship" or not, but Eleanor was close to her secretary, Malvina "Tommy" Thompson. When Tommy needed nursing, Eleanor did it, including giving her shots in the rear! 
• The Roosevelts wanted to offer the king and queen of England hot dogs. People were outraged. Especially Mama. Eleanor cared not and got cheerfully snarky about this topic in her column, pointing out that other food would be around. 
• I feel sorry for Missy: she had a huge stroke, got paralyzed, lost her ability to talk, and died young. 
• Another "romantic friendship" for Eleanor is the younger Joe Lash, who already has a married girlfriend that Eleanor befriends too. "I'll be at the house soon after six and waiting to both kiss and spank you," Eleanor wrote him. She wrote him a series of letters when he went into the military. 
• An FBI informant watched when Eleanor went to visit Joe in a hotel room. They didn't leave except for lunch one day. 
• "The FBI file on Eleanor Roosevelt was to be more than three thousand pages long,  one of the thickest files in the entire FBI collection." 
• FDR ran for a third term because WW2 was beginning. He ran for a fourth term even though he knew he was dying because he felt like he needed to see it through. "FDR could not tell anyone about his health. Not Eleanor. Not Anna. Not his sons. No one. This was a pact between him and his doctors. Posterity must never know that FDR had run for a fourth term when he knew he was dying." He claimed that he did not believe the doctors were telling him everything.
• "There was something obsessive about the love FDR inspired in others. The members of his inner circle almost vied with each other to prove how much they loved him." All his girlfriends had their little jealousies and kept an eye out for who got preferential treatment. "The women liked to tell themselves that the president needed them, that they were making up for Eleanor's lacks." 
• When Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd came back into FDR's life after her husband died, she apparently thought he'd been terribly lonely for years. WITH THAT HAREM?!?! 
• Lucy was the one person nobody was open about, and Lucy would sneak off to Warm Springs to visit, which she did on the day he died. Lucy ran for it, but the remaining harem hanging around the house were forced to tell Eleanor that she'd been there. AWKWARD. 
• Eleanor's final "romantic friendship" was Dr. David Gurewitsch, who she had as her doctor and she ended up shacking up with him and his wife. Uh.....? She called him "the most precious person in the world." 

I'll note in the acknowledgements at the back of the book, the author said "I learned quickly that all sources, both primary and secondary, were unreliable. There was so much that could not be said, even in private letters." The author did read Hick and Eleanor's letters (more on that later), Joe Lash's letters and journals and other writings, and Daisy Suckley's "thousands of diaries" kept under her bed. "Without that suitcase, this would have been a different book." She also claims that Blanche Wiesen Cook is who suggested that it got physical with Hick and Earl. 

Anyway, this is juicy as all heck and compelling reading. Four and a half stars.  

Just Jackie: Her Private Years

By Edward Klein.

This is a very odd, fairly juicy, a bit tacky/gross biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, starting after her first husband's death. It shares some details that are just straight up TMI at times and I really wonder how the heck he knew these things, because Jackie doesn't quite seem like the type to dish that level of detail? Hmmmmmmmm. I'm talking sex, periods (guess what other blood she was covered in after her husband got shot in the head), penises, etc. Oy. I know this came out after her death, but that kinda makes me glad that she didn't know that was all outed. Blech. I felt dirty in the bad way.

Other moments:

• Someone brings in a priest for her to confess too after her first husband's death: "What am I supposed to confess, Father? That I neglected to watch the calendar and ate meat some Friday three months ago?"
• There's explanation of the whole "Camelot" thing, which it sounds like Jackie made up more than being a thing Jack was into, per se.
• Black Jack Bouvier used to tell his kid which of her friends' mothers he'd slept with. Class-ay.
• Jackie's miscarriages might have been caused by all the antibiotics Jack was on for chlamydia. 
• "It was a huge mistake for Harding to lecture Jackie Kennedy about history."
• Jackie: "Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher."

Reasons why Aristotle Onassis was horrible:

• Used to date her sister. A quote from her sister: "Ari has showered Jackie with so many presents, I can't stand it. All I've got is three dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn't even wear to her own birthday party." 
• To quote Jack Kennedy: "Onassis is an international pirate." He did not want her to tour around on his yacht while he was still alive.
• Was making moves on Jackie RIGHT after her husband died. 
• Liked to describe, in great detail, of how he had sex with other women.
• I'm not even repeating all the butt stuff.
• Girlfriend beater. 
• Married a 17-year-old when he was 40. 
• He liked to burn his first with with his cigar. "Every Greek, and there are no exceptions, beats his wife. It is good for them. It keeps them in line."
• A quote from Maria Callas's friend: "Of course he loves you. That's why he yells and abuses you and puts you down. If he didn't love you he would just ignore you and be totally indifferent to you."

THIS IS NOT HOW LOVE SHOULD WORK.

• How Jackie announces her engagement to Ari to Bobby Kennedy: "I've agreed to marry Ari. In principle." Whaaaaaaat?
• So many people got invited to the wedding that Ari's own kids didn't have a bedroom, anywhere to sleep, and asked to sleep with the ship's captain. 
• "There was no kiss to mark the end of the ceremony. Not even a smile, or a clasping of hands."
• We're told that someone did walk in and find them having sex on the plane. Ewwww.
• Quote from Ari: "She's got to learn to reconcile herself to being Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, because the only place she'll find sympathy from now on is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis."
• "During the first year of their marriage, the couple spent a total of 225 days together and 140 days apart. Their record of togetherness in the second year was even more dismal."
• I'll say this for their relationship: at one point Jackie learned CPR in case Ari had a heart attack. Ari: "People say Jackie and I don't get along. But how does a wife who is not getting along with her husband take lessons on how to save him from a heart attack? No! She doesn't. She gives him a heart attack. And then she collect his money." 
• Ari's ex-wife Tina married her ah....former brother-in-law who "was widely suspected of having murdered his previous wife, Tina's own sister." Ewwwwwwww. Of course the guy's also a business rival of Ari's. These people.

I couldn't wait for Ari to die, y'all.

Other moments:

• There's not much on Jackie's longterm relationship with Maurice Templesman in this (I swear, even her more casual boyfriends get talked about more), but guess what, he was married. "It is simply part of Maurice's nature to run after women."
• Quote from Jackie: "I don't see why American girls don't just carry bunches of asparagus at their weddings."
• When she was dying, the last time she went out to Le Cirque, she finally ordered all the desserts and actually ate them. 

I guess four stars for honesty (quite a lot of it) and frankness, even if I felt a little oogy at times reading it. 

Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

By Kathleen Dalton.

Exactly what it sounds like, biography of.

Notable points:

• He won a "greatest man in the United States" poll in 1913.
• The author notes that he "left a selective record of himself" and left out his more vulnerable moments in his autobiography, and he tended to be in denial of bad things.
• "He began, and they perpetrated, too, the myth that by force of will he cured himself of asthma." He didn't.
• Theodore's mother was, well, a Southerner who was into slavery and would tell stories about her family's slaves--bad ones. She told the kids these stories and they HATED them. Theodore literally prayed for the Union Army in front of his mother.
• Theodore's dad "demanded that the boy cast off his invalidism by force of will" and told him that being sick was a shame and a sin. 
• Theodore's little brother Elliott (Eleanor's dad) sounds pretty jerky from the getgo. At one point Elliott pitched romantic woo to Theodore's future second wife Edith, but Edith wasn't interested. 
• "He concentrated so hard that he did not notice when his boots caught on fire. While the other Harvard boys drank together, Roosevelt prepared papers on the gifts of crustaceans to be delivered at the Natural History Society."
• Repeatedly, he's described as a "prig" and "Victorian" in his beliefs, and thought he should be a moral guardian. 
• Theodore's true love was his childhood bestie/sweetheart, Edith Carow. Unfortunately, in their youth they had some kind of bad fight nobody knows the details of, and they split up for years on end. During which he fell in love with and married Alice Lee, who only lasted a few years before dying after giving birth to Alice Jr.
• After finally reuniting with Edith, he proposed (again) after six weeks.
• Theodore, in some respects, was all for the equality of women (votes, inheritance, going to law school, possibly military service, and even not forcing a woman to change her name upon marriage). On the other hand, he wanted people to "breed freely" (shocker, I know), was anti-childlessness, pretty much wanted women in the home. And once punched a guy for bringing up wanting to boink friends' wives. 
• After being orphaned, poor Eleanor had to live with her grandmother and uncles--"whose drunkenness required Eleanor to keep three locks on her bedroom door." Good god.
• Theodore wished he had been wounded in war "in some striking and disfiguring way." 
• Theodore on race: on the one hand, he supported African-Americans to prominent jobs, was anti-segregation, invited Booker T. Washington to dinner and caused a scandal about it.  On the other hand, thought whites were superior. He's dubbed a "racialist" rather than racist. 
• "I was rather proud of myself that in all my speeches I did not say anything I had to take back."
• How do you fit six kids and two parents into four White House bedrooms?
• "No other president practice jiujitsu on his son on the White House rug." Or had the pet kangaroo rat hopping across the dining room table. Or walked around on stilts through the gardens. 
• He tried to simplify spelling, getting rid of British spellings (appropriate), but also making it more phonetic. This did not go well. 
• "Alice had buried a voodoo doll in the White House garden to jinx the Tafts." 
• He said "I" so much in his public speeches that the New York World kept track--563,077,202. "I can't even say 'My Country Tis of  Thee' without being accused of egotism." 
• Alice was in favor of her dad running for president on the Bull Moose ticket, but her husband supported Taft. Awkward!
• "Doctors in the crowd were horrified that a bleeding man would endanger his life for an insignificant speech, but no one dared stop him.....Seeing this as a chance to talk "without having his sincerity questioned," he said "this is my big chance, and I am going to make that speech if I die during it."
• "She could not count on him to control his eating, talking, or risk-taking."
• From his book on going through the Brazilian wilderness: "He did not mention his despair, his heart trouble, the threat of erysipelas, the fistula, the possibility of suicide, his inability to walk, being carried by the camaradas, his delirium, or his nearness to death." What he did say: "I remained in good shape until we had passed the last rapids of the chasms." 

Four starts, very comprehensive and honest about his flaws and what he covered up, as well as his adventures. 

The Queen and Di: The Untold Story

By Ingrid Seward. 

Wow, this one is very vicious and anti-Diana. Some royal writers clearly show their bias and hoo boy, this one does it. It theoretically is supposed to be a double hander, but in reality it's "the Queen was supportive, Diana was a mentally ill tantrum thrower." God knows Diana's a complicated figure and it's probably hard to balance out the positive and negative on some levels, but this one is almost entirely negative. We're told Diana had a "disturbing personality change" within a few days of moving in and she had "time on her hands and no interests or ideas to fill it with," and then a paragraph later mentions that she swam and danced. Uh, those are interests? "She simply mooched around, bored and increasingly irritable." She was "a most unwilling pupil" to anyone trying to show her the ropes. She liked to hang out with the kitchen staff.  We're told that Prince Philip refused to train his children to be royal. Then uh....how does anyone learn? Speaking of Balmoral tests and whatnot, nobody told Diana that the royals only buy each other cheap crap for Christmas, so she bought people nice gifts. THE HORROR!!!!! 

Quote from Prince Charles on women: "My constant battle is to escape." Uh-HUH. Diana tried to cuddle with him one night and that's all he would do. On the honeymoon, all he wanted to do was fish and read. The author says that "love is not part of the royal vocabulary." Charles is cited as literally sleeping with his teddy bear. 

For all the various stuff I feel like I've heard over the years about how the royals aren't into therapy, this book claims that a legion of therapists were called in for Diana and that she (according to Ingrid reading the DSM) had borderline personality disorder. I don't feel like I've ever heard that one officially before, nor is it really cited by any medical professional, which clearly the author isn't. HMMMMMMMMM. 

Oh, btw, regarding the "Fagan breaks into the castle" incident, he never got to talk to her at all. So much for fiction. 

God forbid that Diana become more popular than Charles. There's an incident where they had some horrible fight and Diana didn't want to go to the event, so Charles claims she wasn't feeling well, except Diana sucked it up and came in 15 minutes late. How dare she! There's snark about how Diana had to fetch her own Kleenex box. How dare Diana want attention from anyone, especially her husband, and to be so open and crying about it. We're told that Diana started trying to show up the Queen at every possible opportunity by getting a new hairdo or whatever. 

Supposed quote from the Queen: she likes a good gossip, but not if it's about her own family. 

Andrew and Fergie: Andrew is dull but dated interesting girls. Nobody cared that Fergie had "a past" five years after they cared about whether or not Diana was a virgin. "She was a mature woman of experience who knew her own mind and wouldn't be crushed by the Palace system. Or so the thinking went." We're told that Diana fixed up Andrew and Fergie. 

Fun quote from some random nanny: "Those boys are going to need a lot of help if they are not going to end up as barking mad as their mum and dad." 

There's tons of incidents in which either Charles, Diana, or both were well, complete tantruming brats. Charles wastes 'batteries of eggs'' (batteries?!) because he demands a soft boiled egg at all times or something. Diana changes her mind on what she wants to eat. Charles would drive away leaving his wife crying in public. Gifts were thrown into an incinerator. 

We're told that the Queen can handle everybody--a revolving door of prime ministers, state leaders, whatever...but the one person she could never handle was Diana. "The queen was petrified of Diana" because of her popularity. She supposedly said "You take in two girls from broken homes and look how they repay you.' Supposedly the Queen 'shielded" Diana from others' rage, listened to her cry, listened to her lie...but the Panorama interview ended all the uh, "sympathy." 

I'll note that the author seems to have had at least one interview/talk with Diana right before her death, saying that Diana claims that she and Charles did love each other. Hm. 

The author covers Diana and her stepmother Raine on \well, both good points and bad. Raine being thrown out of her own (not even getting to keep the luggage) after Dad died, vs. Diana actually taking steps to make up with her later. That's a surprise. 

I dunno....I felt pretty icky reading this, overall. Nobody's a winner in this one and everyone comes off as awful. Overall it gave me a mean and trashy vibe. My mom saw the book in my "to be reviewed" pile and asked if it was good and I said I would not recommend it. Two stars.