Lash is writing principally about Eleanor Roosevelt, someone I knew and admired, I still think it impossible for anyone to read his narrative without being as moved as I was. Objections duly noted, I confess that I found Eleanor and Franklin completely fascinating. No more does prophet laurel flower in the abandoned Delphi of Plutarch, Johnson, Carlyle, Strachey: PhD mills have polluted the sacred waters. At worst the result is “scholarly” narrative at best, lively soap opera. Nothing is more important than anything else.

Bank balances, invitations to parties, funerals, vastations in the Gallérie d’Apollon-all are presented in a cool democratic way. The Wastebasket School leaves to the reader the task of arranging the mess the author has collected. Lash has not been able to resist the current fashion in popular biography: he puts in everything. Were it shorter, it would a smaller sale but more readers. A journalist by trade, a political activist by inclination, an old friend of Eleanor Roosevelt as luck would have it (hers as well as his), Mr. The man responsible for the latest peek at our masters, off-duty and on, is Joseph Lash. But though Americans dislike history, they do like soap operas about the sexual misbehavior and the illnesses-particularly the illnesses-of real people in high places: “Will handsome, ambitious Franklin ever regain the use of his legs? Tune in tomorrow.” All in all, this kind of voyeurism is not a bad thing in a country where, like snakes, the people shed their pasts each year (“Today nobody even remembers there was a Depression!” Eleanor Roosevelt exclaimed to me in 1960, shaking her head at the dullness of an audience we had been jointly trying to inspire). Edgar and Clyde? Obviously there is a large public curious as to what goes on in the bedrooms of Winter Palace and White House, not to mention who passed whom in the corridors of power. Who’s next for the tandem treatment? Dick and Pat? J.

Joseph lash eleanor and franklin