Upton Bell Collection at UMass Lowell Libraries: Hamilton

In the next installment of the "splendid memoir Roosevelt didn't get to write" (New York Times),  Nigel Hamilton tells the astonishing story of FDR's year-long, defining battle with Churchill, as the war raged in Africa and Italy. Nigel Hamilton's Mantle of Command, long-listed for the National Book Award, drew on years of archival research and interviews to portray FDR in a tight close up, as he determined Allied strategy in the crucial initial phases of World War II. Commander in Chief reveals the astonishing sequel -- suppressed by Winston Churchill in his memoirs -- of Roosevelt's battles with Churchill to maintain that strategy.  Roosevelt knew that the Allies should take Sicily but avoid a wider battle in southern Europe, building experience but saving strength to invade France in early 1944. Churchill seemed to agree at Casablanca -- only to undermine his own generals and the Allied command, testing Roosevelt's patience to the limit. Churchill was afraid of the invasion planned for Normandy, and pushed instead for disastrous fighting in Italy, thereby almost losing the war for the Allies. In a dramatic showdown, FDR finally set the ultimate course for victory by making the ultimate threat. Commander in Chief shows FDR in top form at a crucial time in the modern history of the West.

"JFK: Reckless Youth is the first volume of a monumental new biography of John F. Kennedy - a book that will astonish, entertain, and inform all those interested in the life of America's thirty-sixth president." "Who was the real JFK? Reckless Youth is filled with intriguing new material on virtually every aspect of JFK's early years: his Boston-Irish background; his beloved grandfather Honey Fitz; his draft-dodging, swindling father, Joseph P. Kennedy; his parents' disastrous and dysfunctional marriage; his loveless upbringing; his expulsion from boarding school; his false starts at college in London and Princeton, followed by his triumphant career at Harvard; his protracted struggle against his father's defeatism and isolationism before Pearl Harbor; his ceaseless career as a playboy; his lifelong battle with illness, and the origins of the deadly disease that would plague him in later days." "In retelling JFK's extraordinary life story, Nigel Hamilton has finally succeeded in getting beyond the many accretions and distortions of recent years. Here at last - often in JFK's own inimitable words - is the real John F. Kennedy, at once roguish and intelligent, reckless and yet possessing fine judgment. Based on a wealth of never previously published letters and documents, and access to more than two thousand interviews, Hamilton's portrait of the tormented, fun-loving, deeply amorous, and yet ambitious youth who was John F. Kennedy is profoundly touching. JFK's courage, despite debilitating ill health, in joining the Navy and insisting on service in PT boats comes to a dramatic climax with the saga of PT 109 in the Solomons - the only American vessel ever rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Against this legendary backdrop Hamilton reveals for the first time the intimate story of the greatest love of JFK's early life: his passionate romance with a suspected enemy spy, Inga Arvad." "The Kennedy that emerges from this volume is, behind his playboy facade, vastly more driven and more serious than historians have ever before portrayed him. As Hamilton shows us, though Joseph Kennedy reluctantly transferred the family's political mantle to his second son in 1944 and "bought out" the sitting congressman for Massachusetts' 11th District, the presidential dream that the ambassador had reserved for his eldest son was in fact JFK's own secret ambition, confessed to his mistress many years before his brother Joe's tragic death." "In this absorbing, riveting family saga, we see the true Jack Kennedy, warts and all; a symbolic, relentlessly honest, yet sympathetic story of the struggles of youth and early manhood that will not only entrance its readers but will also forever alter our understanding of this century's most popular and charismatic American president."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

To mark the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, the stirring climax to Nigel Hamilton's three-part saga of FDR at war--proof that he was WWII's key strategist, even on his deathbed. "A first-class, lens-changing work." --James N. Mattis, former United States Secretary of Defense Nigel Hamilton's celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. Just as FDR was proven right by the D-day landings he had championed, so was he found to be mortally ill in the spring of 1944. He was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness. Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the famous account of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Seventy-five years after the D-day landings we finally get to see, close-up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing, and insisting upon, the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why the invasion was led by Eisenhower. As FDR's D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, we watch with heartbreaking compassion the course of the disease, and how, in the months left him as US commander in chief, the dying president attempted at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Now we know: even on his deathbed, FDR was the war's great visionary.