beginning tonight on channel 8, a 7 part series from Ken Burns on the Roosevelts. tonight part 1 at 7 and again at 9.Teddy Roosevelt would never get elected in 2014
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This article originally appeared on Slate.After
binge-watching Ken Burns' latest 14-hour documentary on the Roosevelts,
I moved through the world at its deliberate pace. I was scheduled to
meet Burns for breakfast and panned across the restaurant looking for
him the way his camera helps you find a young FDR in a Harvard group
photo. A trusted narrator in my head described the scene, accompanied by
a piano. I expected David McCullough would be letting us know about the
specials on the menu.The pace quickened upon contact. Ken Burns
is not like a Ken Burns film. He is fast-moving and speaks in riffs,
nearly the linguistic opposite of his carefully constructed
documentaries. Over 45 minutes our conversation touched on Harry Potter, the shooting in Ferguson, Vietnam, the Affordable Care Act,
money in politics, shredded attention, restraint, the press, Mitch
McConnell, Tolstoy, Ecclesiastes, steroids in baseball, the missing
Malaysian airliner, and the nature of art.And yet we still had
time for the crowded lives of Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt,
and the more than 100 years of American history contained in The Roosevelts
(airing at 8 p.m. Eastern on PBS from Sept. 14 to 20), which Burns
spent the last seven years shaping into a seven-part narrative. It is
three stories interwoven: the American story of rapid industrial and
cultural change from the Progressive Era through World War II, the
political story of two men who shaped the modern presidency, and the
personal story of three towering figures full of wounds and failures and
triumphs.http://www.cbsnews.com/news/teddy-roosevelt-franklin-roosevelt-and-the-modern-presidency/ 4951