Rating: 
Summary: Dee- lighted!!!
Review: This is the second installment in a proposed 3 volume work on the life of this great American. Mr. Morris has given us a compelling volume which starts with Roosevelt learning of McKinley's death and ending with him leaving Washington 7 and 1/2 years later. Roosevelt's accomplihments are many - trust busting, the Panama Canal, the Nobel Peace Prize, etc. He launched the US as a world power. I found this work written in a very readable style and the subject matter is utterly fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: A real leader as president
Review: The second volume of Morris's planned three part biography of Roosevelt is a great, and informative, read. Roosevelt is viewed by many as one of the U.S.'s great presidents and this volume puts paid to that opinion. Morris also shows how Roosevelt was a great leader, something that can be entirely seperate from being the president.Morris shows, masterfully, how Roosevelt lead the country to consider conservation of resources on a national level. Roosevelt also provided leadership on fighting corporate trusts and other business crisis's in the first decade of the 20th centrury. He also tried to challenge lynching and racism, in the basis of his own upbringing. It is well written, well researched and a well paced book that really shows the authors love for the subject and gives the reader a picture into why so many Americans of his time disliked his actions or opinions on many subjects, but stilled loved and admired him as president.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as amazing as the first TR work, but entertaining
Review: After reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, also by Morris, I was very eager to get to this book. The first one was full of audacious behavior, writing, and was thoroughly interesting throughout. This one, unfortunately, seemed a little more predicatable and mundane. I was interested throughout the book, and listened with anticipation for details about the Panama Canal, and his many firsts as president (first to leave the country, first to fly in an airplane, first to ride in a submarine...), but these were not even mentioned. Granted, there was a lot to work with, but hteir omission surprised me. Theodore Roosevelt is a large reason why our country is as dominant as it is, even 80 years after his death. This book will definitely teach you about the man and his presidency, but is not up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning effort of its earlier work Morris wrote before.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful.
Review: Mr. Morris belongs to that category of biographers who really can make you breathe the air which his subject did. He's on par with William Manchester, David McCullough and Robert Remini. It seems like you're sitting on Teddy's shoulder when he sends the Great White Fleet around the world or goes and visits the malaria plauged jungles of Panama. Theodore Roosevelt was an incredible personality whose decisions have echoed down through a hundred years and will continue into the future. In his terms as president he set aside nearly 1/5th of the continental USA as nature preserves. The Panama Canal wouldn't have been in Panama, which wouldn't have been a nation, without Teddy. Trust buster, Rough Rider, New Yorker, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, intellectual, author: Rex barely begins to describe him. I hope and pray that Mr. Morris finishes his trilogy before another 20 years pass. Read this.
Rating: 
Summary: A great man and an a good book
Review: Just wanted to add my two cents in agreement about the overbearing writing of this book. It often got in the way of my enjoying the tale of America's larger than life leader. Along the same lines, there was a large amount of frustration with the overacted narration by the reader on the Audio CDs. He spent the whole time doing a Teddy impression that soon wore thin. However, anything that can bring such a great and interesting person as TR to life is still very worthwhile even overlooking a few faults.
Rating:
Summary: Nicely done--with a couple of caveats
Review: Theodore Rex was a Christmas present from a sister-in-law who remembered that I had written a master's thesis on Roosevelt thirty years ago. Reading this fresh portrait of TR brought back memories of people and events that once seemed as familiar to me as those in my own life. Morris has thoroughly researched this second volume of his planned three-volume biography, but I have two mild complaints: 1. Morris is addicted to the sort of fine writing that delights in obscure words and unusual metaphors. Sometimes these conceits are so clever that the reader's attention is drawn from Roosevelt to the author's style; sometimes they just fall flat. 2. Morris is a master at using a trivial detail to illumine character or incident. But some trivia is but trivia after all--a lot of banquet menus, for instance--and I regret that Morris did not use the space to better account by setting Roosevelt in his era as William Harbaugh has done in Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1961).
Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing, interesting president
Review: I really enjoyed Theodore Rex. Morris's writing is much better here than in Dutch. Perhaps the second term is given too short a look. Covering the early presidency, particularly immediately after McKinley's assasination, until a few months later is most fascinating. I doubt we'll have another president like TR, and I don't think the modern world could handle him.
Rating:
Summary: A bully portrait of T Rex the president
Review: The second installment in Morris's projected trilogy of TR covers his presidential years. Morris takes a different approach to T Rex in this volume, presenting his administration in a journalistic format, which at times is a little frustrating, but no less rewarding. Morris has presented a vivid portrait of our most indominatable president, focusing on his strengths and discounting many of his weaknesses. What emerges in this biography is not Teddy the warmonger, which many critics considered TR to be, but rather the Theodore the peacemaker. TR was a much better chess player than most people give him credit for being. He knew how to position the American navy in such ways to achieve the best strategic advantage for the United States. He was able to stare down the British and the Germans in Venezuela; and able to maintain the US's key possessions in the Pacific through hard bargaining with Japan. He gave the Russians the opportunity to maintain their pride if not their geopolitical importance, following the Ruso-Japanese war, earning himself the Nobel Peace Prize in the process. TR made a few mistakes along the way, such as selling out Korea for the sake of a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, but these pale in the light of his greater accomplishments. On the domestic front, Morris illustrates TR's concern with the environment and labour. He also charts TR's trials and tribulations in starting the Panama Canal. As TR grew in confidence he was able to get much more accomplished. He seized control of the Republican Party, setting the agenda in his second term. The accidental president was now the driving force in politics, and could have very well served a third term had he not stood by the gentleman's agreement that a president should serve only two terms. A reluctant Taft had very big shoes to fill, as would have any person succeeding this larger than life president. Morris lavishes attention on TR's oldest daughter, Alice. The precocious teenager grows into a fetching young beauty in the course of this narrative, stealing the show on numerous occasions. She upstaged her fellow Americans in Japan, endearing herself to the host country, who followed her every move in the press. Her wedding was a royal affair, with a treasure trove of gifts from the world over. It took a massive storeroom just to hold them all. Morris doesn't spend as much time on Edith, largely because his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris, has written a biography on Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Probably the only journalistic pair to write biographies of a first couple. Not quite as satisfying as "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," but a sterling portrait just the same. Morris seems very comfortable with TR, and one hopes that it won't take another 20 years for the concluding volume in this triptych.
Rating:
Summary: He wrote it twice.
Review: Edmund Morris was finsihing Rex when he set it aside to do the Reagan thing. He returned to it a decade latter a better writer. So he started over again. An excellent effort & better than vol. I, The Rise of TR, which was also excellent.
The accomplishments of his not quite two terms are impressive: Settling the coal strike, breaking monopolies, creating the national parks, the Panama Canal & enlarging the U.S. Navy Much of what he did still impacts us 100 years later. We know about what he did. This book gives it to us in a detailed & yet interesting way.
That he didn't run for another term in 1908 is, in hindsight a tragedy. That he would have won there is no doubt. He was the most popular man in America & celebrated around the the world for negoiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war & winning the Nobel peace prize. Shortly after winning the 1904 election he promised he would not run again. That he had second thoughts there is no doubt. He would have been forgiven for going back on his word. But he had too much integrity for that. How different the world would be today. In the 20th century there are presidents of great intellect: Wilson, Hoover & Clinton. There are presidents of great moral authority: Truman, Carter & ...Ford. There are hightly sucessful presidents: FDR, Ike & the Gipper, & for sheer charisma FDR, Kennedy & again Clinton. In all of these admittedly arbitrary categories Theodore Roosevelt fits easily.
This biography is heavily weighted towards Roosevelt's political life with less emphasis on his personal life that being his wife, Edith. It may simply be that Morris wife, Sylvia Jukes was writing a major biography on Edith, Portrait of a First Lady at the same time. In fact, her book came out two months before his. He may have proofed it & maybe even backed off of Edith a bit, so to speak. Definitely five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Dee-lighted!
Review: This book continues the journey of Theodore Roosevelt's life that the author began chronicling with "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt", covering the two presidential terms that Roosevelt served (a third was his for the taking if he had wanted it), and I have really enjoyed being along for the trip. Before my reading, I knew little of substance of this most historic of American figures, outside of tales of Rough Riders, Big Sticks and Teddy Bears, and I've come away from these books with a great sense of admiration for the man and the President. He went into the office by way of an assassin's bullet, and left it as one of the most popular and beloved presidents ever. He was extremely well-read (current administration take heed), and the depth and breadth of his scholarship was astounding. His actions (for he was a VERY active leader) were very much guided by a strong sense of ideals and morality, yet even so he was a master politician and strategist, and his keen sense of human nature enabled him to further a very progressive legislative agenda, against the opposition of his own Republican party. By the end of his second term, it seems apparent that Roosevelt was a truly independent President, Republican in name only, and I could only wish that we had politicians today that were more guided by their own compasses instead of the courses set by their party leaders. Roosevelt refused to kowtow to the moneyed corporate interests of his day ("the corporate criminal class")outright opposing the growing conglomerates with historic anti-trust legislation. "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere". I believe his conservation agenda alone ranks him among the best of American leaders, and current "conservative" moralists like Jerry "global-warming-is-a-myth" Falwell would do well to read some of his thoughts about the inextricable connection between conservation and morality. We owe many of our national parks and monuments to Teddy's foresight. I hope Edmund Morris continues the tale of Roosevelt's life, the post-presidential years, in a third book. I'll be waiting.
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