'If I see another king,' he joked, 'I think I shall bite him.'

Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain 'Colonel Roosevelt,' he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. The New York-based author breathes real life into his subject, masterfully conveying the former president’s triumphant highs and subsequent lows, as his body betrays him and the limelight fades.Ĭolonel Roosevelt is an epic book about an epic life, and one that lives up to the swagger of the man it chronicles.Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. And while he excels as both a researcher and a storyteller (an ill-fated Brazilian expedition is gripping drama), where Morris really shines is as a conduit for Roosevelt’s personality. Paradoxes, it is clear, are part and parcel of the Roosevelt mythos.Īlthough he lays it out warts and all, Morris is clearly quite fond of his subject. Similarly, achievements in conservation are tempered by his role as a big-game hunter. Indeed, Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese war is counterbalanced by his Medal of Honor for his famed charge up San Juan Hill. The adjective Morris uses is “polygonal”: displaying only certain facets of his personality at any given time. His was a complicated life-adventurous, grandiose, and often contradictory. And let’s not forget that it was Roosevelt who first rallied America against the Muslim world, ordering gunboats to Morocco in 1904 over what appeared to be the kidnapping of a U.S. Take, for example, his ruthless African safari or his politically expedient dismissal of black civil rights at home. And you know what? It’s one hell of a ride.Īfter all, it was Roosevelt who brought the United States into the 20th century, made it a world power, and, along with his Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst, set a course for empire through “a splendid little war” with Spain.Ī polarizing figure then as now, Roosevelt can easily offend modern sensibilities. Covering the post-presidential years, the work is the final volume in Morris’s Roosevelt trilogy (along with 1979’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and 2001’s Theodore Rex), fleshing the former president out big-as-life. There’s much more to the man, of course, as Edmund Morris ably demonstrates in Colonel Roosevelt.

president Theodore Roosevelt.Ī century after his presidency, the reckless adventuring and self-indulgent posturing tend to coalesce into caricature: all teeth and pince-nez glasses, full of sound and fury.

Colonel roosevelt book