FDR

Jean Edward Smith combines recent scholarship with a wide range of primary sources in a full biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He traces Roosevelt's struggle with polio and disability and shows how it hardened the resolve he later brought to the Great Depression and the threat of totalitarianism in wartime. The private life receives close attention, especially the four women who shaped him: his mother Sara Delano Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor, Lucy Mercer and his secretary Missy LeHand. Smith also examines the failures, among them the attempt to remake the judiciary, the internment of Japanese Americans and executive overreach, and weighs his response to the Holocaust. It appeared in 2007.

It appears on a published list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency.