Word: eleanor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN by Joseph P. Lash. 765 pages. Norton...
...Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood sounds almost too bad to be true. To her father Elliott, she was "a miracle from heaven," but Elliott was usually drunk. Her mother Anna was a New York beauty who wanted "a precious boy." Aunt Edith took one look and concluded: "Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future." When she proved to be a solemn child, her mother took to referring to her as "Granny...
There were other misfortunes. For two tender years she painfully wore a metal back brace to correct a spinal curvature. On an 1887 ocean crossing-following a European tour that was unaccountably supposed to divorce Elliott from alcohol-the Roosevelts' ship was rammed by another, and Eleanor was treated to a 77tam'c-style scene of tragedy and hysteria that left her with a lifelong fear of water...
...genius has its unattractive side. The suicides of such men as Baudelaire and Hemingway were notorious. For other public men the close, personal scrutiny has come posthumously. A recent biography published a quarter century after Franklin Roosevelt's death focuses on his cruelty to Eleanor and--according to George Orwell--even Mohandas Gandhi was something less than a Mahatma. What is interesting is that so often with famous men the same inclinations that led to their public success also led to their personal failures...
...Eleanor and Franklin, Lash