Word: mcculloughs
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...superb historian, McCullough (The Path Between the Seas, The Johnstown Flood) has done his homework on everything affecting Teddy's early life...
...expounds the latest theories on asthma; young Roosevelt's matriculation at Harvard is the occasion for an evocative set piece on undergraduate life in the 1870s; after the graduate becomes a New York assemblyman at the age of 23, McCullough weaves in a marvelous little essay on Tammany-style logrolling...
...Mornings on Horseback finally lacks the salient characteristic of the Roosevelts-enthusiasm. In spite of Teddy's strenuous self-improvement and relentless selfdiscipline, McCullough finds something spoiled about the prig who talks of keeping himself "pure," for some "rare and radiant maiden" and postures for the camera as "the plainsman" in custom-tailored buckskins with dagger and sheath from Tiffany. The author appears to prefer Black Sheep Elliott, who, lacking what he called his brother's "foolish grit," collapsed under the responsibility of being a Roosevelt, although surviving long enough to father Eleanor, the wife...
...Roosevelts were a blessed and blighted family-an American tragedy as well as an American success story. One of them ought to have seen this, and that someone, McCullough implies, should have been Teddy. In the Badlands of Dakota, while recovering from the deaths (on the same day) of his mother and first wife Alice Lee, Teddy, at 25, wrote of "melancholy pathless plains" and "deathlike stillness"-the moral geography of Edgar Allan Poe. Here he came as close as he ever would to confessing to his demons...
...Rough Rider, pronouncing life to be bully, went out on horseback in the morning, with his latest glasses and his latest shotgun, and fired away at everything living. McCullough scrupulously follows his subject. But because of Teddy's determined blindness of heart, he cannot love him or quite forgive him. -By Melvin Maddocks