NO ORDINARY TIME, Doris Kearns, Goodwin Simon & Schuster, $300 IT is one of those quirks of history that anyone asked to name the American president who steered America through World War II would probably reply 'Truman'. Yet Harry Truman had scarcely sat down in the Oval Office before the atomic bombs which brought the conflict to a close had been dropped.
The central figure, as a moment's reflection would reveal, was Franklin Roosevelt, but recently he seems to have gone out of fashion.
If anything can redress that aberration it will be this book, tediously sub-titled Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.
This is one of those monumental, exhaustively researched American tomes, written by a lady who has already performed a similar service for the memory of Kennedy and Johnson.
You may well flinch in the opening pages (with nearly 750 more to go) to be told exactly what President Roosevelt had for breakfast in the White House on the morning in May, 1940, when it became known that the Germans had invaded Europe. Not just what he ate but what newspapers he read.
But bear with it.
