The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Short Review: This really is good. It is more of a 4.5 star book than 4, but not quite a 5. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is very readable. It runs from his birth until the assassination of McKinley. There are two more books to round out the trilogy of biographies.

I was surprised when I looked it up to see that this biography is nearly 40 years old. It does not feel at all dated.

Roosevelt is a fascinating character, although with full of blind spots and quite self centered. But also with enormous reserves of energy and drive.

The two main weaknesses in the biography was, especially in the younger years, to be a bit too cute about what Roosevelt would become. We are reading about him at the end of his life knowing what he would become and that feels like it too strongly influenced how the discussion of how he grew up and developed.

Second, this may be about the era the book was written, but while there is a lot of discussion about Roosevelt's personal morality and ethics, there was virtually no discussion about religious or other motivations about where that morality and ethics were derived from and why it was important to him. The only reference I can think of to Roosevelt's specific religious life was a reference to him being married in a Unitarian church and that he was a sunday school teacher for a while. But I have no idea whether he was a unitarian or a more orthodox Christian or if faith was even important to him.

Maybe his religious motivation and ethics were actually unimportant, but the it feels like knowing more about that would have given some insights into his blind spots. (He was for instance relatively progressive on issues of women's rights and rights for african americans but not for Native Americans until later in life and not for non-Americans, for instance the Cubans that he was relating to during the Spanish American war.


My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/theodore-roosevelt/

The audio book version of this book is excellent; the narrator adopts Teddy Roosevelt's voice when reading excerpts from letters, interviews, etc. and really brings the President to life. Of course, Edmund Mortis is to be credited for such a thorough and interesting account of TR's early life and delves into this larger-than-life man filled with contradictions.