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Review
Praise for Colonel Roosevelt
"Now with Colonel Roosevelt, the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud." –Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Exemplary… Consistently rich and on point, with rapidly developing events providing a backdrop for the balanced examination [Morris] presents of his subject…The TR trilogy is masterful, and can rightfully take its place among the truly outstanding biographies of the American presidency." –LA Times
"Reading Edmund Morris on Teddy Roosevelt is like listening to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach: You know from the first note you’re in inspired hands. In Colonel Roosevelt—the final installment in a trilogy that began with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex—Morris registers the Bull Moose’s last decade in handsome, sweeping prose that avoids the valedictory chord struck by biographers who, nearing the end of their prodigious labors, resort to swooning across the chapters, unwilling to let go of their muse." – The Washingtonian
"Colonel Roosevelt, the third part of his three-volume biography of Roosevelt, is a worthy and extremely engaging culmination of Mr. Morris' work. It is popular history at its best." –Claude R. Marx, The Washington Times
Praise for the classic biographies by Edmond Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A towering biography.”—Time
Theodore Rex
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
“A masterpiece . . . A great president has finally found a great biographer.”—The Washington Post
“As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Magnificent . . . a compulsively readable, beautifully measured and paced account.”—Chicago Tribune
"Now with Colonel Roosevelt, the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud." –Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Exemplary… Consistently rich and on point, with rapidly developing events providing a backdrop for the balanced examination [Morris] presents of his subject…The TR trilogy is masterful, and can rightfully take its place among the truly outstanding biographies of the American presidency." –LA Times
"Reading Edmund Morris on Teddy Roosevelt is like listening to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach: You know from the first note you’re in inspired hands. In Colonel Roosevelt—the final installment in a trilogy that began with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex—Morris registers the Bull Moose’s last decade in handsome, sweeping prose that avoids the valedictory chord struck by biographers who, nearing the end of their prodigious labors, resort to swooning across the chapters, unwilling to let go of their muse." – The Washingtonian
"Colonel Roosevelt, the third part of his three-volume biography of Roosevelt, is a worthy and extremely engaging culmination of Mr. Morris' work. It is popular history at its best." –Claude R. Marx, The Washington Times
Praise for the classic biographies by Edmond Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A towering biography.”—Time
Theodore Rex
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
“A masterpiece . . . A great president has finally found a great biographer.”—The Washington Post
“As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Magnificent . . . a compulsively readable, beautifully measured and paced account.”—Chicago Tribune
Product Description
Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. “If I see another king,” he joked, “I think I shall bite him.”
Had TR won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.
This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?
Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his “journey into the Pleistocene”—a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR’s bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.
Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous “New Nationalism” speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR’s fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel “was the greatest man I ever knew.”)
Then follows a detailed account of TR’s reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR’s literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913–1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures—from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man’s universality. The Colonel himself remarked, “I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know.”
Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved—the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. “He is just like a big boy—there is a sweetness about him that you can’t resist.” That makes the story of TR’s last year, when the “boy” in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.
Had TR won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.
This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?
Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his “journey into the Pleistocene”—a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR’s bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.
Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous “New Nationalism” speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR’s fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel “was the greatest man I ever knew.”)
Then follows a detailed account of TR’s reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR’s literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913–1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures—from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man’s universality. The Colonel himself remarked, “I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know.”
Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved—the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. “He is just like a big boy—there is a sweetness about him that you can’t resist.” That makes the story of TR’s last year, when the “boy” in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Man In The Arena,
By
This review is from: Colonel Roosevelt (Hardcover)
"Colonel Roosevelt" is the conclusion of Edmund Morris' magnificent three volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Covering the post presidential years, it tells the story of the Man in the Arena "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again...who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." For TR it was a time of great enthusiasm, great devotions, worthy causes, high achievement and failure while daring greatly. Having retired from the pinnacle of power and popularity when he could have had a third and we will never know how many terms, TR was relegated to the role of a critic, not that of an actor, certainly a frustrating circumstance for him.After leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, launched the largest safari known to Equatorial Africa, a scientific expedition to gather specimens for Smithsonian Institution and for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Upon returning to civilization he was met by disgruntled Progressives calling for his return to the political arena to restore the promise of the past. His return home through Europe was a triumphant tour reminiscent of that of General Grant almost forty years before. He returned to an America that had, in the view of himself and his supporters, deviated from the course that he had set for it. Gradually becoming more vocal, he enunciated the Progressive Platform at Osawatomie, Kansas in August 1910. Heeding the pleas of his supporters, the Colonel entered the 1912 presidential race because "We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord." After being denied the Republican nomination by party bosses, Roosevelt took on the leadership of the Bull Moose Party, guiding it to a respectable, though disappointing, second place finish. After this defeat, the Colonel joined Kermit in a recklessly dangerous exploration of the Brazilian River of Doubt, later renamed the Rio Roosevelt. During this "last chance to be a boy" TR almost died from disease and, but for the forbearance of Indians who followed the expedition, could have ended up being a meal for cannibals. Upon his return to New York, Colonel Roosevelt again entered the arena, this time as a critic of the Wilson administration, particularly its foreign policy concerning the war that was then consuming Europe. Despite his increasing disgust with Wilson, he declined to consider a run in 1916. Sickened from malaria, blind in one eye from a boxing accident while in the White House, the Colonel begged to be allowed to rejoin the army for World War I, only to be rejected by President Wilson. TR was only able to participate in this war vicariously through his sons who all served and were wounded, Quentin fatally. From then on health and frustration led to a declining life until, while still planning a return to the White House in 1920, the Old Lion died in his sleep in 1919. The story is bigger than life, a real world tragedy of a great heart who strove mightily but was not allowed to fulfill his destiny, a twentieth Century Leer who voluntarily gave up power only to see his world crumble while he is helpless to stop it. The writing is a fair fit for the story. Edmund Morris' ability to tell a tale is a match for any author. I have now completed the trilogy and have enjoyed every moment, every word of it. TR would not have missed such an adventure and neither should you.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Political Giant on a Moral Crusade,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Colonel Roosevelt (Hardcover)
This third book of Morris' trilogy on TR is both monumental in how it defines the historical stature of this great man and analytical on how it explains the impact of his political views on the times. I thoroughly enjoyed this study because it focuses on how Roosevelt handled himself when out of power in the latter years of his life. "Colonel Roosevelt" takes us into a world where Teddy continued to thrive by promoting his ideas of a new international order on the world stage. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he saw a world about to dramatically change as it attempted to civilize and modernize itself. In his estimation, nations would have to work together to realize the common virtues of peace and prosperity to avoid the entanglements of war. After leaving the White House in 1908, Roosevelt became a diplomat for hire, a world traveller and celebrated statesman. Morris goes into some incredibly colorful detail about his safaris in Africa and journeys through the jungles of the Amazon. His tenacious return to politics as head of the Progressive Party (Bull Moose) in 1910 is another intriguing chapter in the life of a man who did not want to see America's date with destiny denied by muddled politics in Washington. Between copious writing, endless public speaking, and hobnobbing with international celebrities of like mind, Roosevelt always managed to stay in the limelight throughout the second decade of the century when the country was struggling to find an international identity in a world torn by war. While President Wilson was hung up between protecting American neutrality and finding a platform for promoting peace, Roosevelt, the old rough rider and modern liberal imperialist, was bucking to promote a greater sense of Pax Americana. He saw his country as having the moral rectitude to lead the world into the modern era with a sense of democratic virtue and romantic chivalry. Lots of his personal life is included in the telling of this rich and complex tale of a person whose volubility was only matched by the wisdom and gravity of what he had to say about both the political and natural world around him. Nature, like society, was meant be controlled and nurtured for the benefit of all. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to appreciate the width and breadth of Roosevelt's influence in public affairs during a time when the US was on the verge of becoming a world power. Morris is a very objective historian who has a brilliant command of the issues and the language needed to comprehend them. This book, like the other two, is visceral in its impact on the senses. The reader gets to enjoy Roosevelt in the raw as he attempted to reconcile the civilized with the uncivilized.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb!,
By
This review is from: Colonel Roosevelt (Hardcover)
This final volume of Morris' trilogy covers the last decade of Teddy Roosevelt's life. It is terrific reading and worthy of another Pulitzer. A larger than life character in all ways, TR is fascinating but not always admirable. His egotism lead him to despise and oppose his successor Taft and, later, to attempt to undermine the pre war policies of Wilson. His bombast and jingoism met their match in the horrors of the First World War, which included personal tragedy for him and his family. Morris' writing is fresh and insightful. Highly recommended.
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