There was a time when a young college freshman who had paid a disproportionate amount of time to following the exploits of baseball and football teams and was now seeking to play catch up and learn something about American history and politics received a Christmas gift that he found practical and intellectually stimulating.

This college freshman's father idolized President Franklin Delano Roosevelt among all other political leaders and gifted the young man just beginning his trek into the realm of knowledge with a copy of The Politics of Upheaval, the latest in the series of works on the only president in American history to be elected four times, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

To provide an illustration of the importance of this work as a developmental tool on this young student's mind, it is necessary to move forward to when this same person's first historical work was published.

I know this individual well since it happens to be me.  I learned how absorbing I found Schlesinger's book, as well as the influence it had on me, when I was living in Cape Cod and was being interviewed about my first historical work, Struggle for the Holy Land, by a local radio personality, Rob Morris.