Before the Trumpet - by Geoffrey C Ward (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Before Pearl Harbor, before polio and his entry into politics, FDR was a handsome, pampered, but strong-willed youth, the center of a rarefied world. In Before the Trumpet, the award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward transports the reader to that world--Hyde Park on the Hudson and Campobello Island, Groton and Harvard and the Continent--to recreate as never before the formative years of the man who would become the 20th century's greatest president. Here, drawn from thousands of original documents (many never previously published), is a richly-detailed, intimate biography, its central figure surrounded by a colorful cast that includes an opium smuggler and a pious headmaster; Franklin's distant cousin, Theodore and his remarkable mother, Sara; and the still-more remarkable young woman he wooed and won, his cousin Eleanor. This is a tale that would grip the reader even if its central character had not grown up to be FDR.

Review Quotes

"Suffused with magic . . . a wonderful book." --John Lukacs, The Philadelphia Enquirer

"An engrossing biography . . . Magnificent social history . . . a triumph of scholarly detective work."--The New Yorker

"The freshest and most penetrating study of the young FDR." --Chicago Sunday Tribune

"The texture is . . . richer, the detail more finely tuned than in any other portrait." --The New York Times Book Review

"Quite the best thing I have ever read about FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. The wonder is that [it] unearths so much new and revealing material--letters, conversations, insights . . . appealing and inspiring."--Atlanta Constitution

About the Author

Geoffrey C. Ward is the coauthor of The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns), and the author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize.