cover image The Roosevelt Women

The Roosevelt Women

Betty Boyd Caroli. Basic Books, $30 (511pp) ISBN 978-0-465-07133-3

With numerous full biographies available, there is something unsatisfying about Caroli's brief, chapter-length life-summaries for Theodore Roosevelt's sharp-tongued daughter, Alice Longworth, and her less-quarrelsome cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, so often the target of Alice's barbs. More valuable are Caroli's profiles of fascinating Roosevelts less familiar to readers and biographers, women such as TR's second daughter, Ethel Derby (who died in 1977 after a lifetime of good works), and his niece Corinne Alsop (Republican political activist and mother of journalist Joseph Alsop), not to mention his sisters Corinne Robinson (writer and prot g e of Edith Wharton) and Anna Cowles (one of TR's most savvy political advisers). At the end of the book, one is left wishing Caroli (First Ladies and Inside the White House) had cast a wider net in her search for featured players. Why, for example, does preeminent anthropologist Anna C. Roosevelt (the recipient of a MacArthur ""genius"" award) rate only five or six lines? And why do Selwa (Lucky) Roosevelt's few lines contain no hint of her distinguished foreign service career, or its culmination with the post of chief of protocol for the U.S. under Ronald Reagan? This often good book would have been much better without these and similar errors of omission. Illustrated. (Oct.)