|
|
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Modern Library Paperbacks) (Paperback)
by Edmund Morris
| Category:
Biography, American history, American presidency |
| Market price: ¥ 198.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
In Stock |
|
|
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An epic biography of one of the greatest men and presidents in American history, this awe-inspiring book is a must own for anyone. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Edmund Morris
Publisher: Modern Library
Pub. in: November, 2001
ISBN: 0375756787
Pages: 920
Measurements: 8 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00239
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0375756788
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award (in North America) in 1980. |
|
- MSL Picks -
In our time, biographies of American historical figures are noticeably numerous, yet one volume stands above the rest as a supreme example of the genre: Edmund Morris's masterpiece The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps it may be premature to call a book barely thirty years old a masterpiece. But the amazing scope and detail covered by Morris's study, as well as his excellent scholarship and writing, firmly place his work, which won both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, in the pantheon of great biographies. At the same time, it wins the distinction of being an addictively enjoyable read, being both awe-inspiring and adventurous.
When originally written, The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt was the first volume of a planned trilogy, covering only the years from the subject's birth to his ascent to the Presidency. But the material in Rise is so rich and absorbing it need not be put into additional context. Even for those not familiar with history and the details of Roosevelt's life (and perhaps especially for those who will be introduced to him for the first time), the story is fascinating. Roosevelt has been called one of the most fascinating figures in American history, and Morris's book serves to confirm the reputation. With the exception of a brief prologue which takes us to the White House for one day during T.R.'s presidential years, which gives Morris the opportunity to powerfully describe his subject for the first time, and an interlude toward the middle of the book, where the author, in spell-binding prose, recounts an exceptionally harsh winter that struck the Badlands in 1886-1887, events proceed chronologically, unfolding excitingly before the reader's eyes. We meet the young "Teedie," son of a divided household during the Civil War, his father a prominent New Yorker, and his mother a delicate Southern belle, and follow him on his numerous travels around Europe and the Old World as a boy, where he begins his education. He is a sickly child, almost near death, and must fight to overcome his afflictions and become strong. He develops an unnaturally deep passion for science, and spends a lot of his youth as an amateur zoologists. He enrolls at Harvard, where his strong personality begins to develop. He soon becomes an amateur historian of great success and a fire-branding young New York assemblyman. Some of the most humorous and touching passages come as his courtship and marriage to the beautiful Alice Lee are described. When Alice and his mother both die on the same day, Roosevelt's spirit is shattered, and he heads West to the Dakota badlands, where we witness the growth of Roosevelt the cowboy, rancher and hunter. It is there that the young man develops the love for wild nature that he will carry throughout his life (and plant the seeds for his leadership in the conservation movement at the turn of the century). He marries his childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow, and begins to work his way up in politics once more, first as a Civil Service Commissioner in Washington and then as a New York City Police Commissioner. In both roles he earns a widespread reputation as a reformer, and by the time William McKinley captures the White House in 1896 Roosevelt is promised a post in the new administration. He chooses to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and from that position involves himself in the imperialistic push that was then taking over the country, clamoring for a stronger navy and war with Spain. When the war breaks out, he immediately enlists and raises a regiment of cavalry, composed of a motley assortment of Eastern gentlemen and Western cowboys. He leads his celebrated Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and wins a spectacular victory that quickly ends the war. By the time McKinley is up for re-election, Roosevelt is on the ticket, and soon becomes a heartbeat away from office. When, one morning while hiking in the Adirondacks, he learns of tragic news, he realizes his destiny has forever changed.
Although thus ends the narrative, Morris's work has a sort of completeness to it. Indeed, the following years would contain many ups and downs for the larger-than-life Roosevelt, yet from his birth to his inauguration in 1901 his life was at its most astonishing. It was both a meteoric rise for the youngest man ever to become President, but also dazzling in its diversity. The multitude of occupations and roles that Roosevelt undertook is unbelievable. He was the prototype of the man of action combined with the prototype of the Renaissance man: a uniquely American type, armed with heavy muscles, grinning teeth, and flashing spectacles. Morris's writing is perfectly adapted to the task. He simply lifts Roosevelt out of the page, and brings him into the reader's mind and heart as a powerful life force. The most common theme by almost everyone who met Roosevelt for the first time is that they were shocked and soon overwhelmed by the strength of the man's personality. The highest credit to Morris is that he has duplicated the effect, through the written word, for readers decades later to experience the same feeling of awe.
(From quoting an American reader)
Target readers:
Readers who are interested in Theodore Roosevelt, American presidency, American history, leadership, political skills, and/or great biographies.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
Theodore Rex (Modern Library Paperbacks)
:
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
|
|
Edmund Morris was born in Kenya and educated at the Prince of Wales School, Nairobi, and Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before emigrating to the United States in 1968. His biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980. In 1985 he was appointed Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer. He has written extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and The Washington Post. The second volume of his Roosevelt biography, Theodore Rex, is currently under way, and will be followed by a third. Edmund Morris lives in New York and Washington, D.C., with his wife and fellow biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris.
|
|
From Publisher
Described by the Chicago Tribune as "a classic," The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001 marks the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt becoming president.
|
Chapter 1
The Very Small Person
Then King Olaf entered,
Beautiful as morning,
Like the sun at Easter
Shone his happy face.
On the late afternoon of 27 October 1858, a flurry of activity disturbed the genteel quietness of East Twentieth Street, New York City. Liveried servants flew out of the basement of No. 28, the Roosevelt brownstone, and hurried off in search of doctors, midwives, and stray members of the family-a difficult task, for it was now the fashionable visiting hour. Meanwhile Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt lay tossing in her satinwood bed, awaiting the arrival of her second child and first son.
Gaslight was flaring on the cobbles by the time a doctor arrived. The child was born at a quarter to eight, emerging so easily that neither chloroform nor instruments were needed. “Consequently,” reported his grandmother, “the dear little thing has no cuts nor bruises about it.” Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, was “as sweet and pretty a young baby as I have ever seen.”
Mittie Roosevelt, inspecting her son the following morning, disagreed. She said, with Southern frankness, that he looked like a terrapin.
Apart from these two contradictory images, there are no further visual descriptions of the newborn baby. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and was more than usually noisy. When he reappears in the family chronicles ten months later, he has acquired a milk-crust and a nickname, “Teedie.” At eighteen months the milk-crust has gone, but the nickname has not. He is now “almost a little beauty.”
Scattered references in other letters indicate a bright, hyperactive infant. Yet already the first of a succession of congenital ailments was beginning to weaken him. Asthma crowded his lungs, depriving him of sleep. “One of my memories,” the ex-President wrote in his Autobiography, “is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.” Even more nightmarish was the recollection of those same strong arms holding him, as the Roosevelt rig sped through darkened city streets, forcing a rush of air into the tiny lungs.
Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, was no stranger to childhood suffering. Gifted himself with magnificent health and strength-“I never seem to get tired”-he overflowed with sympathy for the small, the weak, the lame, and the poor. Even in that age when a certain amount of charitable work was expected of well-born citizens, he was remarkable for his passionate efforts on behalf of the waifs of New York. He had what he called “a troublesome conscience.”
Every seventh day of his life was dedicated to teaching in mission schools, distributing tracts, and interviewing wayward children. Long after dark he would come home after dinner at some such institution as the Newsboys’ Lodging-House, or Mrs. Sattery’s Night School for Little Italians. One of his prime concerns, as a founder of the Children’s Aid Society, was to send street urchins to work on farms in the West. His charity extended as far as sick kittens, which could be seen peeking from his pockets as he drove down Broadway.
At the time of Teedie’s birth, Theodore Senior was twenty-seven years old, a partner in the old importing firm of Roosevelt and Son, and already one of the most influential men in New York. Handsome, wealthy, and gregarious, he was at ease with millionaires and paupers, never showing a trace of snobbery, real or inverse, in his relations with either class. “I can see him now,” remembered a society matron years later, “in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging-House, and later dashing off to an evening party on Fifth Avenue.”
A photograph taken in 1862 shows deep eyes, leonine features, a glossy beard, and big, sloping shoulders. “He was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man,” said his nephew Emlen Roosevelt, "... deep through, with a sense of abundant strength and power." The word “power” runs like a leitmotif through other descriptions of Theodore Senior: he was a person of inexorable drive. “A certain expression” on his face, as he strode breezily into the offices of business acquaintances, was enough to flip pocketbooks open. “How much this time, Theodore?”
For all his compulsive philanthropy, he was neither sanctimonious nor ascetic. He took an exuberant, masculine joy in life, riding his horse through Central Park "as though born in the saddle," exercising with the energy of a teenager, waltzing all night long at society balls. Driving his four-in-hand back home in the small hours of the morning, he rattled through the streets at such a rate that his grooms allegedly "fell out at the corners."
Such a combination of physical vitality and genuine love of humanity was rare indeed. His son called Theodore Senior "the best man I ever knew," adding, "... but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid."
In all respects except their intense love for each other, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt were striking opposites. Where he was big and disciplined and manly, “Mittie” was small, vague, and feminine to the point of caricature. He was the archetypal Northern burgher, she the Southern belle eternal, a lady about whom there always clung a hint of white columns and wisteria bowers. Born and raised in the luxury of a Georgia plantation, she remained, according to her son, “entirely unreconstructed until the day of her death.”
Of her beauty, especially in her youth (she was twenty-three when Teedie was born), contemporary accounts are unanimous in their praise. Her hair was fine and silky black, with a luster her French hairdresser called noir doré. Her skin was “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and in her cheeks there glowed a suggestion of coral.14 Every day she took two successive baths, “one for cleaning, one for rinsing,” and she dressed habitually in white muslin, summer and winter. “No dirt,” an admirer marveled, “ever stopped near her.”
On Mittie’s afternoons “at home” she would sit in her pale blue parlor, surrounded always by bunches of violets, while “neat little maids in lilac print gowns” escorted guests into her presence. Invariably they were enchanted. “Such loveliness of line and tinting . . . such sweet courtesy of manner!” gushed Mrs. Burton Harrison, a memoirist of the period. Of five or six gentlewomen whose “birth, breeding, and tact” established them as the flowers of New York society, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily the most beautiful.” |
|
| View all 10 comments |
W. A. Swanberg (The New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Magnificent... a sweeping narrative of the outward man and a shrewd examination of his character... It is one of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment. There should be a queue awaiting the next volume.
|
Robert Kirsch (Los Angeles Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Theodore Roosevelt, in this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, has a claim on being the most interesting man ever to be President of this country.
|
The Atlantic Monthly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Spectacles glittering, teeth and temper flashing, high-pitched voice rasping and crackling, Roosevelt surges out of these pages with the force of a physical presence.
|
Bill Slocum (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
It's hard to imagine a figure like the Theodore Roosevelt as presented by Edmund Morris popping up in a work of fiction. "Too farfetched," some editor would say, and with reason. Here you have wrapped in one skin a bona fide war hero, a writer of popular histories, a legislator, a cowboy, a police commissioner, a governor, and a navy assistant secretary who goes on to become the nation's youngest president.
TR, as he is called (never "Teddy" to his face unless you were related), straddled the centuries, characterizing both the refined ideal of the 19th century and the galvanic purpose of the 20th without being dated by too close an identification to either.
Morris marks his man at the outset, in a colorful preface set during his presidency (a period which Morris doesn't include in this, his first of three projected volumes on TR) where we see Roosevelt mostly through the eyes of those around him, throwing out his characteristic phrase "dee-lighted" as he breaks the all-time record for most handshakes at a single event without sign of strain.
Notes one witness: "You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk - and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes."
I felt the same way putting down this book, which by the way is hard to do. Morris writes extraordinarily well, not only about Roosevelt but the times that created him and the people who surrounded him. Even the footnotes are enjoyably readable.
You get a lot of Roosevelt's boisterousness, expressing his philosophy that "Life is strife" and that a nation must be willing "to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and its tears like water, rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown."
At the same time, there's a warmth and sensitivity to Morris' portrait. Roosevelt was a man who allowed for no doubts, but some surprising nuances. He was able to laugh along with those who poked fun at his spectacles, for example, because he understood the ungainly glasses were a way of sticking out that set him further apart from the crowd. He valued his manly bearing but could pray and cry with surprising abandon.
Morris establishes himself as a writer with the skills and persistence to attach himself, remora-like, to this human cyclone, not to mention the eloquence for capturing his many twists and turns. (One gets the feeling he was absolutely the wrong choice to biography Ronald Reagan, as he did in the misbegotten "Dutch", because Reagan was nearly as passive a figure as Roosevelt was active.)
While some carp Morris is too positive in his presentation here, I beg to differ. Morris captures Roosevelt's double-dealings with two political parties en route to the New York governorship, and his shunting aside of Navy ambassador John Long, for a time Roosevelt's immediate superior. It's just that Morris writes with agreeable sympathy, and duly notes Roosevelt's many achievements large and small, such as championing reform in the era of the bosses and ensuring the first-time election of a black delegate to head a political convention. Roosevelt was the grandest figure in the Republic between the Civil War and World War I, not faultless but capable of incredible feats.
"I have only a second-rate brain, but I think I have a capacity for action," Roosevelt once said of himself. In fact, Roosevelt was that rare blend of smarts and guts. With this bio, you feel like you have gained an exclusive audience with this extraordinary man. |
View all 10 comments |
|
|
|
|
