Word: morrisã
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Theodore Rex could be criticized as a presidential hagiography. It is a portrait of a man of few obvious personal faults, and his political ones often seem irrelevant. Morris??€™ biography might have pointed out more prominently the ambiguous legacy of Roosevelt’s colonialism, or that it was not Roosevelt but his obesely benign successor William Howard Taft who had the most success busting trusts and regulating the robber barons. And he offers less psychologizing in this volume than in his account of Roosevelt’s early years; there is little talk, for instance, of Roosevelt?...
...scene is a representative one in the political life of a man whose energy, earnestness and sheer charisma drove those who met him to awe. Morris??€™ new biography, Theodore Rex, covers in dramatic detail the Roosevelt administrations (1901-9) and, more importantly, their leader, whom more than one commentator characterized as the supreme political personality of his time. The previous installment of Morris??€™ Roosevelt trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize...
What comes across with striking clarity in this biography are two things: Roosevelt’s vigor and his endless supply of moral confidence. As a politician and as a private person, the man was nervy. Morris??€™ title refers to a comment from Henry James that fairly summed up his autocratic style of leadership as he tore through opposition—foreign and domestic—to achieve what he considered the only moral outcomes. Opposition, such as he saw at Harvard, was lazy and callow: “Those who remain on the sidelines...
...Morris??€™ previous biography was the bestselling pseudo-memoir Dutch, the only authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. The two presidents have much in common and are still very different: both had tremendous charisma and popularity—enough to merit personal biographies as much as political ones. Both presidents, as Morris??€™ title suggests, secretly wished to rule their country like kings. But Roosevelt has the edge on Reagan as a thinker and scholar, and unlike Reagan (who had such the soul of a performer that Morris himself felt it appropriate to make things up in his biography...
Theodore Rex could be criticized as a presidential hagiography. It is a portrait of a man of few obvious personal faults, and his political ones often seem irrelevant. Morris??€™ biography might have pointed out more prominently the ambiguous legacy of Roosevelt’s colonialism, or that it was not Roosevelt but his obesely benign successor William Howard Taft who had the most success busting trusts and regulating the robber barons. And he offers less psychologizing in this volume than in his account of Roosevelt’s early years; there is little talk, for instance, of Roosevelt?...