Books: One of Those Who Served

THIS I REMEMBER (387 pp.)—Eleanor Roosevelt—Harper ($4.50).

"There are some things I know that I feel sure nobody else can know," says Eleanor Roosevelt in casual explanation of why she wrote the second volume of her autobiography. For more than four years, while Franklin Roosevelt's housekeepers and bodyguards, speechwriters and Cabinet members have been carrying their manuscripts to the publishers, his widow has said little about him beyond some references in her syndicated newspaper column. In This-I Remember, she tells her story of the Roosevelts' private life in the White House.

Author Roosevelt's memoir has little of the high historic excitement of Robert...