War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. History is bunk!

As the Second World War drew to a close three politicians with very different agendas gathered to discuss the peace. Churchill, dedicated to preserving the remnants of the British Empire, Roosevelt, dedicated to replacing the old empires with the United Nations and Stalin, dedicated to restoring the Russian Empire into a Soviet one. Of the three only Churchill failed entirely. Roosevelt’s continuation of Wilson’s dream never succeeded at its stated goals but is becoming a nightmare empire of dysfunction in the next century. Stalin’s success was immediate but never complete enough to be lasting and while it still exists, like a death star, it can only destroy – never create. While this book may be a record of the conference – albeit with strong predispositions – it is lacking in its explanations of both cause and effect and fails to show the horror of the consequences of imperialism regardless of its origins or intentions.

Yalta : the price of peace  S.M. Plokhy  New York : Viking, 2010  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xxviii, 451 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-430) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In February 1945 Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea, as their armies converged on Berlin. Each came with sharply different views of what the world should look like after the war. Over the course of eight fateful days they partitioned Germany, approved the most aggressive aerial bombing campaign in history, redrew the borders of Eastern Europe, and created a new international organization to settle future disputes.

Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, Stalin was strengthening his grip on Poland, and Churchill was on the cusp of a humiliating electoral defeat.

For sixty-five years, opinion has been bitterly divided on what they achieved. Did Yalta pave the way to the Cold War? Did an ailing FDR give too much to Stalin? While the accepted verdict on both questions has been, and remains, a resounding YES!, In this book Plokhy draws on newly declassified Soviet documents to sanitize the truth of Yalta and paint an original – if inaccurate – portrait of FDR and Churchill as a wartime leaders.

We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us he shall be treated on an exact equality with every one else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birth-place or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American… Theodore Roosevelt

Hot time in the old town : the great heat wave of 1896 and the making of Theodore Roosevelt  Edward P. Kohn  New York : Basic Books, c 2010  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xv, 288 p. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-278) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Theodore Roosevelt is best remembered as America’s prototypical “cowboy” president — a Rough Rider who derived his political wisdom from a youth spent in the untamed American West. But while the great outdoors certainly shaped Roosevelt’s identity, historian Edward P. Kohn argues that it was his hometown of New York that made him the progressive president we celebrate today.

During his early political career, Roosevelt took on local Republican factions and Tammany Hall Democrats alike, proving his commitment to reform at all costs. He combated the city’s rampant corruption, and helped to guide New York through the perils of rabid urbanization and the challenges of accommodating an influx of immigrants — experiences that would serve him well as president of the United States.

A riveting account of a man and a city on the brink of greatness, this book reveals that Roosevelt’s true education took place not in the West but on the mean streets of nineteenth-century New York.

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength… Theodore Roosevelt

When trumpets call : Theodore Roosevelt after the White House New York : Simon & Schuster, c 2005 Patricia O’Toole Hardcover. 1st. ed. and printing. x, 494 p. : ill., map ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [467]-471) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text.  VG/VG

A remarkable portrait of one of our most remarkable presidents, When Trumpets Call focuses on Theodore Roosevelt’s life after the White House. TR had reveled in his power and used it to enlarge the scope of the office, expand government’s role in economic affairs, and increase U.S. influence abroad. Only fifty when he left the White House, he would spend the rest of his life longing to return.

Drawing from a wealth of new and previously unused sources, Patricia O’Toole, author of the highly acclaimed biography of Henry Adams and his friends, The Five of Hearts, conducts the first thorough investigation of the most eventful, most revealing decade of Roosevelt’s life.

When he left office in March 1909, Roosevelt went on safari, leaving the political stage to William Howard Taft, the friend he had selected to succeed him. Home from Africa and gravely disappointed in Taft, he could not resist challenging Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. When Taft bested him, Roosevelt formed the Bull Moose Party and ran for president on a third ticket, a move that split the Republican vote and put Woodrow Wilson in the White House.

In 1914, after the beginning of World War I, Roosevelt became the most vocal critic of Wilson’s foreign policy, and two years later, hoping to oust Wilson, Roosevelt maneuvered behind the scenes in another failed bid for the Republican nomination. Turned down by Wilson in his request to raise troops and take them to France, TR helped his four sons realize their wish to serve, then pressured Washington to speed up the war effort. His youngest son was killed on Bastille Day, 1918. Theodore Roosevelt died six months later. His last written words were a reminder to himself to see the chairman of the Republican Party.

Surprising, original, deeply moving, When Trumpets Call is a portrait framed by a deeply human question: What happens to a powerful man when he loses power? Most of all, it is an unforgettable close-up of Theodore Roosevelt as he struggled not only to recover power but also to maintain a much-needed sense of purpose. Through her perceptive treatment of his last decade, Patricia O’Toole shows why Theodore Roosevelt still enjoys the affection and esteem of Americans across the political spectrum.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind… Winston Churchill

The last thousand days of the British empire : Churchill, Roosevelt, and the birth of the Pax Americana New York : Bloomsbury Press : Distributed to the trade by Macmillan, c 2008 Peter Clarke Decolonization Colonies Great Britain History 20th century Book. xxvii, 559 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 516-545) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG

A history of the sudden end of the British Empire and the moment when America became a world superpower. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” was Winston Churchill’s empty brag in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn. With America to back him he pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the worldwide institution that he had served for most of his life yet less than five years after Churchill’s braggadocio, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain’s empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned.

How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke’s book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swift-paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures through whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events.

Clarke traces the intimate and conflicted nature of the “special relationship,” showing how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and reveals how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it ended. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself – the one thing it does not adequately do is fix the blame for the chaos that followed the empire on the policies of the empire.