HISTORY

Jim Bishop, FDR’s Last Year: April 1944-April 1945. Most books about Franklin Roosevelt are overly nostalgic and insufficiently detached, often to the point of outright fawning. Not so this 1974 best seller, which is rightly remembered as the first book to have made known to the general public the fact that Roosevelt was desperately ill when he ran for a fourth term–and that his doctors lied about it. While it’s written in a lively but over-obvious journalistic style and devoid (alas) of source notes, Bishop interviewed as many of FDR’s surviving friends, family members, and colleagues as possible, and the results remain grippingly readable (TT).