The Amazing Roosevelt Family, 1613-1942
$3.75
By WILFRED FUNK
As the title adjective will hint in advance to the judicious and the suspicious, this family chronicle is not written with overmuch sobriety. It is, to tell the truth, persistently spiced with the least admirable mannerisms of the gossip column, from the exploitation of mere prattle down to the chronic use of the exclamation point to confer piquancy on sentences that have none and on other sentences that have more without it. Moreover, the treatment of the Presidential Roosevelts and their families, occupying over two-fifths of the book, is fulsome in tone as to the Hyde Park branch and monotonously sarcastic as to the Oyster Hay branch, without adding much to the commonly accessible information about either. Nevertheless, on the simple score of legit imate curiosity gratified, the book well justifies its existence and would earn forgiveness for more and worse faults than it has. Between its presentation of the little that is known of Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt (d. 1658) and its treatment of the parents of our twenty-sixth and thirty-second Presidents it unearths a large number of interesting data touching not only five variegated generations of Roosevelts, in both the direct and the collateral lines, but also the history from colonial times of the society to which they belonged. And the history of that society is the early history of northeastern America. For the Roosevelts, who have some of their blood from the New Amsterdam that we associate with their name, have no negligible part of their blood - or, it would appear from the record, of their characters - from Yankee sources that go back to the first shipload of Pilgrim Fathers. W. F.