The New Book

Since I don't have much time for pleasure reading anymore, I decided to pick up a light piece: "Churchill: A Life" by Martin Gilbert. By saying "light" I am being sarcastic. It's close to 1,100 pages, counting the index. But I've been in a Churchill mood since watching "The Gathering Storm," which I recommend highly.

The summary of Gilbert's work says:

After publishing the eighth and final volume of Churchill's official biography in 1988, Martin Gilbert was finally free to devote himself to his own one-volume account of this compelling life. The result is a brilliant marriage of the hard facts of the public life and intimate details of the private man -- a vital portrait of one of the most remarkable men of any age.

This one should be good, although I'll have to be disciplined to finish reading it.

By the way, I watched "Warm Springs" on Sunday night, the portrayal of the FDR years from when he contracted polio to the 1928 nominating speech of Al Smith (which set the stage for Roosevelt's own successful campaign for the presidency four years later):

Following an early and promising political career, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is stricken with polio in 1923 at 39 years of age. This film follows his struggle with his paralysis, the refuge he took in an obscure and run-down Georgia health spa, and the family pressure to return to public life and politics. Perhaps the most significant battle he fought with the stigma of paralysis was not in the eyes of others but in his own mind.

Kenneth Branagh did an excellent job as FDR, without slipping into what often becomes a caricature of the man. (There is life after "Harry Potter"!) And I love Memphis native Kathy Bates in anything. ("Face it, I'm older and I have more insurance!") But Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor, well, I had a hard time putting "Sex in the City" out of my mind and equating her with the serious Mrs. Roosevelt. Overall, I give it an "A-", not quite "The Gathering Storm," but very good.

P.S. Some nice "inside baseball" to the movie is that Jane Alexander plays Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR's mother. Ms. Alexander previously played Eleanor Roosevelt on television back in the 1970s in "Eleanor and Franklin" and "Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years". Clever.