FDR on His Houseboat

While FDR was sailing the Keys, the larger world was glittering. Chaplin, Gershwin, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham--all were flourishing in the Roaring Twenties, but so were Stalin, Al Capone, and Hitler. The world went on as Roosevelt fished for mangrove snapper and drank martinis.

Karen Chase presents FDR's log entries, interspersed with photographs from the tumultuous outer world, to form a kind of timeline between two arenas--one man's small private life full of struggle and fun, juxtaposed with the large public sphere. Chase gives us a side of FDR seldom seen before, revealing his wit, his penchant for practical jokes, and his zest for each day's ordinary concerns in the context of his painful struggle to regain the use of his legs. The book also includes a facsimile of the original Larooco log. For many decades FDR's log was virtually unknown to the public, appearing only once, in 1949, in his son Elliott's four-volume collection of Roosevelt's personal letters.