Been a while since I did many book reviews. And this one is actually an audiobook, but since I just finished it (after receiving it over a year ago), let me off my two cents:
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (1979)
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This audio adaptation (abridged, but still weighing in at a dozen discs or so) of Morris’ Pullitzer Prize-winning biography, is a solid and entertaining, if not overly-illuminating chronology of TR’s childhood through his brief vice-presidency, leaving off just as McKinley dies from an assassination. It covers this broad and interesting subject with enthusiasm and extensive use of the diaries and letters of TR (and some of his family and associates), but in the end the subject remains a big-grinning bespectacled
icon of American history. I learned more about TR’s life, but not as much as I’d like about him.
Part of that is because TR was, for all his outgoing energy, a very private man. There were subjects (such as the death of his first wife) that he never talked or wrote about, even to acknowledge they had happened. He was zealous in building himself from a frail, distracted poindexter of a child into an ideal man, for both the public and his own self-image — rough and tumble as a westerner and “Rough Rider,” yet learned and of unimpeachable ethics. As a result, much of what can be gleaned, even from primary
sources, is that ideal image. It wasn’t just about reputation, though that was clearly of far more importance to TR than he would admit, but about how he saw himself, reflected in others’ eyes and his own.
TR, in this work, lives up to that ideal — a Man’s Man, a Man of Virtue — remarkably well. If still a man of his times — his description of the Indians, Cubans, Spaniards, and the glories of hunting and war, for example, would all be highly impolitic today — he also served as one of the key torchbearers of the progressive movement, serving on the cutting edge of civil service reform, financial reform, and caring for the working class and poor, as well as the early stirrings of his natural conservationism.
If there are plenty of areas he could be criticized for today for falling far short of modern sensibilities, at the time he was considered a radical, a loose cannon, someone who, even as a Republican, was a threat to the status quo.
If nothing else, we learn here the facts (if not always, the reasons) for Roosevelt’s ascent and shaping. I ended up knowing a lot more about TR — his youthful love of biology, his bouts of illness, his western ventures, his romantic entanglements, his service in Cuba, and his political career — than I had (which was part of the intent, after all).
The book is narrated by Harry Chase, who does a solid job of it. He gives accents and mannerisms to the written dialog in places that sometimes seem to jar, but never too much, and his diction is clear, his pace steady and solid.
Worth either reading or listening to. I have the presidential sequel, “Theodore Rex, on my wish list …