Word: rooseveltã
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Earnestness grows tiresome fast, however, and it is a strength of both the biographer and his subject that it is leavened with snapshots of Roosevelt??€™s extraordinary energy and curiosity. At various points in the narrative we are informed that Roosevelt was studying jujitsu, conducting ornithological surveys, reading unreal amounts of literature and nonfiction, steering submarines, publishing papers on natural history, setting the Guiness record for shaking hands and killing bears—all while in office. When he invited foreign emissaries for weekend jaunts, he advised them to wear clothes they didn’t care about...
Theodore Rex could be criticized as a presidential hagiography. It is a portrait of a man of few obvious personal faults, and his political ones often seem irrelevant. Morris’ biography might have pointed out more prominently the ambiguous legacy of Roosevelt??€™s colonialism, or that it was not Roosevelt but his obesely benign successor William Howard Taft who had the most success busting trusts and regulating the robber barons. And he offers less psychologizing in this volume than in his account of Roosevelt??€™s early years; there is little talk, for instance, of Roosevelt?...
...great irony that one of the United States’ most erudite presidents was also one of the least suited for the patient, critical style of university life. Roosevelt??€™s senior thesis at Harvard had grown within a couple years of his graduation into a full-scale volume of naval history that remains today the definitive work in its field. And yet he could not shake his disdain for an institution that despite its resources had produced only one of the three men most prominent in American colonialism—Secretary of War (later State) Elihu Root, Philippines...
What comes across with striking clarity in this biography are two things: Roosevelt??€™s vigor and his endless supply of moral confidence. As a politician and as a private person, the man was nervy. Morris’ title refers to a comment from Henry James that fairly summed up his autocratic style of leadership as he tore through opposition—foreign and domestic—to achieve what he considered the only moral outcomes. Opposition, such as he saw at Harvard, was lazy and callow: “Those who remain on the sidelines...
Earnestness grows tiresome fast, however, and it is a strength of both the biographer and his subject that it is leavened with snapshots of Roosevelt??€™s extraordinary energy and curiosity. At various points in the narrative we are informed that Roosevelt was studying jujitsu, conducting ornithological surveys, reading unreal amounts of literature and nonfiction, steering submarines, publishing papers on natural history, setting the Guiness record for shaking hands and killing bears—all while in office. When he invited foreign emissaries for weekend jaunts, he advised them to wear clothes they didn’t care about...