FRANKLIN AND WINSTON - Jon Meacham. Read by Grover Gardner

Description

FRANKLIN AND WINSTON: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

by Jon Meacham (2003)



Narrated by Grover Gardner

11 CDs to MP3 with iTunes 8 (254 tracks)

Bitrate: ~82kbps (mono, VBR).



Publisher: Books On Tape (2003); Unabridged

ISBN-10: 0736695796; ISBN-13: 978-0736695794



Cheers, FerraBit

February 2009



Links: 

[url]http://books.google.com/books?id=1VDYI6IzbSgC[/url]

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Meacham[/url]



Originally posted: thepiratebay, demonoid, mininova

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 The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering
leaders.



  Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In
Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world
to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister
spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid
cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park,
Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and
their children.



    From Publishers Weekly

  Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek (editor, Voices in Our Blood), delivers an eloquent, well-researched account of
one of the 20th century's most vital friendships: that between FDR and Winston Churchill. Both men were privileged sons
of wealth, and both had forebears (in Churchill's case, Leonard Jerome) prominent in New York society during the 19th
century. Both enjoyed cocktails and a smoke. And both were committed to the Anglo-American alliance. Indeed, Roosevelt
and Churchill each believed firmly that the "English-speaking peoples" represented the civilized world's
first, best hope to counter and conquer the barbarism of the Axis. Meacham uses previously untapped archives and has
interviewed surviving Roosevelt and Churchill staffers present at the great men's meetings in Washington, Hyde Park,
Casablanca and Tehran. Thus he has considerable new ground to break, new anecdotes to offer and prescient observations
to make. Throughout, Meacham highlights Roosevelt's and Churchill's shared backgrounds as sons of the ruling elite,
their genuine, gregarious friendship, and their common worldview during staggeringly troubled times. To meet with
Roosevelt, Churchill recalled years later, "with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence," was like
"opening a bottle of champagne"-a bottle from which the tippling Churchill desperately needed a good long pull
through 1940 and '41, as the Nazis savaged Europe and tortured British civilians with air attacks. One comes away from
this account convinced of the "Great Personality" theory of history and gratified that Roosevelt and Churchill
possessed the character that they did and came to power at a time when no other partnership would do. 



    From The New Yorker

  After their first meeting, in 1918, Roosevelt said that Churchill was "a stinker" Churchill didn't even
remember Roosevelt. But by their next exchange, in 1939, Churchill was convinced that Britain's future depended on
getting Roosevelt to like him. Meacham's engaging account argues that personal bonds between leaders are crucial to
international politics. He draws heavily on diaries and letters to describe a complicated courtship and, at times, seems
amazed at what Winston is willing to put up with from Franklin. Churchill paints a landscape for the President, sings
for him, and agonizes when his notes go unanswered; Roosevelt teases him in front of Stalin, criticizes him to
reporters, and eventually breaks his heart with a diverging vision of the postwar world. But Churchill never gives up,
and he later recalled, "No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President
Roosevelt." 



 

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