Rating: 
Summary: A masterpiece - again!
Review: Edmund Morris's second volume on TR is - again - a masterpiece. Everybody who enjoyed "The Rise of TR" will spend highly interesting hours reading about the presidency years.
"Theodore Rex" is full of details, anecdotes and funny little episodes. Morris paints a bright and
vivid picture of the life and work of Teddy. I especially like the stories involving the whole
Roosevelt family. Family life with TR the father is never boring, always active but also difficult at
times. What a remarkable family! Besides, let's hope that Morris will not wait for another 22
years before publishing the final volume of his view on TR!
Rating:
Summary: The best biography--continued
Review: This book is a continuation of the best biography I ever read, Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" and it starts up where the latter book left off, both in the biographical aspect as well as in being a great biography. Morris' skills in weaving an easily readable story with copious notes (they are as interesting as the biography) shows that he has not lost his touch since the first volume was published in 1979. I was concerned about how this volume would come out after the use of a fictional character in Dutch, but my fears have been completely alleviated. This is a great volume about a great man, and still very relevant to today's world. (See the portion on the Phillipine war with fanatical muslims fighting to the death.) I can't wait for volume 3.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Bad, Not "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" either.
Review: This is a well written biography. But if you remember the enlightened prose of his "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" it's not here. I believe this is more balanced than the gung ho early life portrayal, but Edmund seems to lack the ability to portray the multiple perspectives of situations that exist in history. You get one point of view and that is it. This forces you to read at least another biographers work on Theodore Roosevelt in order to put together a realistic portrayal of this man. If you don't understand what I mean then read H. W. Brand's "T.R: The Last Romantic" to see a biography that can admit that the same situation has many interpretations.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANTLY WRITTEN ....BRING ON VOLUME THREE !!
Review: The critical and public reaction to this wonderful book ought to go a long way towards washing out the bad taste in his mouth Mr. Morris was left with after the "Dutch" fiasco. "Theodore Rex" is so well written that it stands head-and-shoulders above almost any non-fiction book (not just biography)in recent memory. I don't think I'm going out on a limb in predicting another Pulitzer Prize for the author. Yes, that's how good this book is.It is only a slight exaggeration to say that you could open up this book to almost any page and come away with at least one memorable sentence or paragraph. Mr. Morris has the ability to paint personalities with words, with a few impressionistic strokes of the pen. One of the best things about the book is that it isn't only T.R. who is portrayed- many, many people who came into the presidential orbit from 1901-1909 are brought to life in these pages. Here is an example, concerning J.P.Morgan: "There was something volcanic about Morgan. The hot glare and fiery complexion, flushing so deep that the engorged nose seemed about to burst, the smoldering cigar, the mountainous shoulders- merely to look at him was to register tremors. Yet interlocutors soon discovered that Morgan's sparks and smoke were a kind of screen, concealing someone essentially quiet and shy, almost clerical. As a youth, he had dreamed of becoming a professor of mathematics; he was equally attracted to the rituals of the Episcopal Church, in which he had served as a vestryman for forty years.... He sought relief from numbers by collecting indiscriminate quantities of great or ghastly art. His Madison Avenue library bulged with uncut volumes. Occasionally, in country homes, Morgan would fumble at a passing woman." Morris does this over and over throughout the book, seemingly effortlessly. Notice I said "seemingly!" Morris can capture a scene just as well as he can capture a personality. Here he is on the signing of the Panama Canal treaty: "Conscious that Dr. Amador might at any minute knock on Hay's door, Bunau-Varilla was quite willing to forgo the reading. He had not thought to bring a seal, so the Secretary offered him a choice of sealing rings. Bunau-Varilla chose one embossed with the Hay coat of arms. The clock stood at 6:40 p.m. Pens scratched across parchment. Wax melted on silk. Two oceans brimmed closer, ready to spill." Great stuff! After you finish reading this book T.R. will be with you forever, a force of nature- rising above the tired cliche "one of a kind." It will be readily apparent why, if he had wanted to run again in 1908, Roosevelt would have had no difficulty being re-elected by a wide margin. I and countless others had to wait 20 years for this book. I only hope we don't have to wait another 20 for volume three!
Rating:
Summary: point of clarification
Review: I read Morris's first book on TR many years ago when it first came out and found it to be one of the finest biographies I've ever read. I am eager to read this new work. I will write a review of it as soon as I complete it but I need to make a correction to a previous reviewer who stated that Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest president "up to that time." Theodore Roosevelt is still our youngest president to hold office, being sworn in at the age of 42. JFK was 43 when he was sworn in. A small point to an otherwise fine review.
Rating:
Summary: The big man with the big stick...good book!
Review: Edmund Morris is a talented biographer. In Theodore Roosevelt, he had an easy subject. Teddy Roosevelt was such an enigmatic character that most writers would have had an easy time of penning this biography. Morris, however, has done it quite well. Mr. Roosevelt fit the mold of history-maker as though he was destined for it. Quite simply, he was born to it. This book is the follow-up to the very solid "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," a book following Mr. Roosevelt's early years as he takes the Presidency as a result of William McKinley's assassination. This book, "Theodore Rex," (the moniker given to Mr. Roosevelt by Henry James) chronicles Mr. Roosevelt's nearly two terms in the office of the President. "Rex" reflects all of Mr. Roosevelt's profiled characteristics and acts, the good and the bad. It should be pointed out that during his term(s) in office, Mr. Roosevelt had significantly all politic circles (bipartisan) wrapped around his finger (something that only Reagan has approached since that time). That said and refreshingly pointed out by Morris, Mr. Roosevelt was literally vilified by many citizens (refreshing in that Morris presents all sides of this story). Although Mr. Roosevelt had many incredible achievements, the one that I found the the most surprising was his Nobel Peace Prize for being a major contributor to bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. A very unlikely award for a U.S. President. "Theodore Rex" does a relatively good job of fairly depicting the good and the bad of Mr. Roosevelt's seven and one-half years in office...a very honest biography. A truly great man, a truly solid biography. You'll not be sorry you invested in this tome.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding presidential bio - a real treat
Review: I read Morris' "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" about 20 years ago, and was extremely impressed with his writing. Written almost as if it's a novel, it was a welcome departure from the usual plodding, fact-filled, head-nodding bios of the 1980s. After a disappointing Reagan bio ("Dutch") I'm happy to say that "Theodore Rex" is every bit as impressive as the first TR volume. The writing will leave you stunned at times - Morris is almost in a class by himself as a biographer. Perhaps only Robert Caro, William Manchester, and Robert Massie are his contemporary equals.
Rating:
Summary: A President Who Enjoyed Center Stage
Review: If you did not like Mr. Morris's biography of President Reagan, give Mr. Morris another chance. Theodore Rex is the best book I have read on President Theodore Roosevelt's almost 8 years in office, after having started as our youngest president to that point in time. I found the recent David McCullough biography of John Adams as the closest comparable work. Both biographers rely a lot on the subject's own words and those of the people he interacted with. I found three qualities of Theodore Rex to be superior to the Adams biography. First, Mr. Morris has chosen to magnify issues that are of more interest to us today which are often virtually ignored in conventional histories. Some of these subjects involved Mr. Roosevelt's attitudes towards minority groups including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews. Other related subjects included what he chose to say and do about discrimination and lynchings, willingness to address a pogrom in Russia, and atrocities conduced by the Army in the Philippines. Second, Mr. Morris doesn't try to "pretty up" the ugly sides of his subject. In these first areas above, President Roosevelt did some good things . . . but he also did some pretty awful ones. His support for bad conduct dismissals of African-American troops after complaints in Brownsville, Texas, was particularly questionable, coming at a time when he had little at risk politically by doing the right thing and he was outspoken in other areas. Third, Mr. Morris has an eye for detail that makes the scenes come alive to extend beyond the mere words and events being presented. I particularly enjoyed the description of Roosevelt's first few days as president. The Adams biography is superior in that most of that material came in the form of letters from Abigail and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and the quality of what they had to say was usually a lot more interesting than what President Roosevelt and his cronies and family wrote or said. The perspective on Roosevelt is almost totally a near contemporary one. This material reads like something we might review now about President Reagan's presidency. For those who are not familiar with U.S. political, social, and economic history prior to and during this time, some of the sections will be hard to fathom. That is a major weakness of the book. The other major weakness is that the coverage of subjects is unbalanced in length. For example, there is a lengthy section on some gunboat diplomacy to help out two hostages in Morocco, one of whom is thought to be an American. Other than showing that Roosevelt liked to send in the Navy, this material didn't warrant the attention it receives here. If you are like me, you will enjoy the way that Mr. Morris displays how Roosevelt built a power base by espousing popular issues like trust-busting to wean himself away from political dependency on Senator Mark Hanna. President Roosevelt's ability to work the newspapers to his advantage was astonishingly adroit for an "accidental" president with limited prior experience in public office. On the personal side, the book is filled with examples of President Roosevelt's love of all forms of physical activity, including eating, and the way that he sought to preserve privacy for his personal life. Late in his presidency, he could not read very well with his left eye due to a boxing injury received in a match while president. Having become president due to the assassination of President McKinley, you will read with interest his own close calls with death and a potential assassin. The vignettes involving his very independent daughter, Alice, will amuse you in many cases. On the other hand, you may be annoyed (as I was) to learn that President Roosevelt's final decision about the Brownsville soldiers was withheld for a few days with the probable motive of helping his son-in-law, Alice's husband, be re-elected to Congress. The almost total silence on the drawbacks of American geographic expansion through influence over the Philippines, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba and some South American countries was also unwarranted. Apparently, the ideology that justified all of this was a form of Social Darwinism. Having finished the book, I thought about the task of a presidential biographer. We want to learn about the important history of the period. We also want to learn how the president did, compared to the alternatives. We further want to know about the president's character and style. And we want to see all of this in context. Reading this fine biography of President Roosevelt made me realize what a tough task this really is. How would our world be different today if McKinley had not been assassinated? Probably not as good because the abuses of the trusts would probably have lasted longer, conservation would not have emerged as soon as a social force, and our tradition of encouraging international peace would not be so well established. Be prepared to encourage others to do the right thing!
Rating:
Summary: Dee-lighted! A bully book about a bully President
Review: As this work of popular history by Edmund Morris begins, it's the early morning of 14 September 1901. President McKinley lies dying in Buffalo, NY, mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt is on his way by buckboard and train from his isolated vacation cabin in Upper Tahawus, NY. Over the next 7 years and 169 days, THEODORE REX would drag and shove the United States into the twentieth century.
Unlike perhaps other biographies of TR, this one only hints at his life before his ascendancy to the White House, and ends somewhat abruptly on the day he transferred the mantle of power to William Howard Taft on 4 March 1909. In between, Morris hits all the high points of Roosevelt's two administrations: acquisition of the rights to build the Panama Canal, settlement of the 1902 coal strike, arbitration of the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, build-up of the American Navy, establishment of Cuban independence, and the calling of a national conservation conference. And certainly the low point - Theodore's response to the 1906 Brownsville Incident, wherein 20-30 Black troops of the 25th U.S. Infantry allegedly went on a shooting rampage in that Texas town. One of the strengths of the author's prose is that it never becomes ponderous. Indeed, at times, it approaches oddly lyrical, as when he describes the signing of the canal treaty between newly independent Panama and the U.S.: "Pens scratched across parchment. Wax melted on silk. Two oceans brimmed closer, ready to spill." THEODORE REX isn't solely about great affairs of State. Did you know that both Teddy and his eldest daughter, Alice, habitually carried pistols. What would today's anti-gun lobby make of that! The book also serves to dispel a Hollywood myth regarding the 1904 Perdicaris Affair, in which an American citizen in Tangier was kidnapped by the desert insurgent Ahmed ben Mohammed el Raisuli, an event memorialized in celluloid by the vastly entertaining 1975 film, THE WIND AND THE LION, starring Candice Bergen and Sean Connery. Had the movie been more true to fact, Ms. Bergen couldn't have played the role unless dressed in drag. With my short attention span and too many books waiting on the shelf, this narrative of Roosevelt's Presidency is just about as good as it gets. At 555 paperback pages, it's long, but not too long to bog me down for weeks. It's detailed, compiled from a nine-page bibliography of sources, but not so detailed as to become tedious. And it's got photographs - one or two in each of its thirty-two chapters. At the book's conclusion, I felt I had a satisfactory appreciation of Teddy the man, and was glad I'd taken the opportunity to pick up this excellent volume. My only criticism is the lack of a brief post-epilogue noting Teddy's abortive 1912 attempt to regain the Presidency at the head of the Bull Moose Party, thus splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Woodrow Wilson, which would have perhaps better rounded out the saga. Bully!
Rating:
Summary: A Bully Book!
Review: THEODORE REX, Edmund Morris' second volume in a planned three volume biography of TR, begins seamlessly where THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT ended: At the pinnacle of Mount Marcy, highest point of New York State with TR looking west toward Buffalo, where the mortally wounded William McKinley lay dying.
THEODORE REX begins with TR climbing down a mountain in motion toward the White House and it ends with TR on a train in motion away from the White House. The intervening 600 pages are a study in constant motion, as the youngest President of the United States became the catalyst of world-altering change. The United States entered his first term as a provincial hemispheric democracy; it exited his last term as a cosmopolitan world superpower. Much of the reason for that was TR by himself, who dragged the rest of the country (including an often-recalcitrant Congress) behind him, a comet and its tail.
Unlike THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, which focused powerfully on the personal elements which formed this extraordinary man, THEODORE REX is less a biography of TR during his Presidency as it is a biography OF his Presidency. The Roosevelt family, so crucial to him, are largely relegated to the background; only his wife Edith and his daughter Alice are fully fleshed out in these pages, Alice somewhat more so than her stepmother (despite the reputed influence that "Edie" had on so many of TR's decisions). This seems an odd lacuna, but a footnote buried in the back refers the reader to (Mrs. Edmund) Sylvia Morris's biography of Edith Roosevelt for a fully-formed picture of family influence upon the President.
For the reader, THEODORE REX is more remote and dignified than the young "Teedie" Roosevelt who was a-rising, but that may be as much the result of Morris's necessary reliance on "official" records and the nature of Presidential hautre, as much as any element in Roosevelt himself during this era in his life.
This short shrift aside, Morris does a splendid job of recreating the halcyon era of the first President Roosevelt. He was a man far ahead of his time, concerned with race relations, conservation, foreign affairs, and controlling the untrammeled growth of monopolies. Morris's scholarship of TR's two terms is exhaustive. The endnotes form a small book, and are interesting, in themselves.
Roosevelt made errors (he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, inflaming Dixie passions to a fever pitch just as he took office, and later dismissed a Black regiment at Brownsville, Texas en masse for insurrection on highly questionable, highly incomplete evidence, setting a destructive precedent in African-American relations with the Federal government), and was often tactless, both with members of Congress, some of whom grew to hate him outright, and with some sectors of the public, who began to think him a madman ("Nobody likes him except the voters.")
But Roosevelt was also the most dynamic of the Presidents, excepting his cousin FDR, in that he dramatically expanded the powers of the Presidency and the influence of the Federal government in regulating business and the economy. Laws establishing general labor standards and health standards were passed (often by main force) during his time. These laws, collectively the "Square Deal," were the underpinnings of FDR's New Deal three decades later. He created the Panama Canal, the technological miracle of the age. Roosevelt delayed the start of the First World War by brokering a peace between Russia and China (winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts), by masterminding the Algeciras Conference between the European Powers, and by creating a new United States Navy of all-steel battleships, the Great White Fleet.
TR enjoyed being President, and was a genial, playful, childlike, sophisticated renaissance man with a golden heart, a sense of noblesse oblige, and the force of temperament needed to lead the United States into the twentieth century. It was impossible not to have an opinion about TR. As one observer said, "You meet him, go home, and wring the personality out of your clothes."
Some of TR's problems sound eeriely familiar and modern: He worked to curb the growing self-interested economic, social and political power of Trusts, giant corporations that controlled the American economy (some still do). He engaged in gunboat diplomacy with a Middle Eastern government over the fate of an American hostage. He squabbled with the conservatives in his own Republican Party about the bounds and balance of power. He faced economic crises that put Wall Street at risk.
His answers were moral and ethical and offered America a new vision of itself. He saw the White House as "a bully pulpit" to address the American people. He led by his own example and by his own convincing arguments. It would not be stretching the point to far to say that our present leadership could learn a few things from emulating Theodore Roosevelt.
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