You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by johnsaveland
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
3.0
This was a mixed success for me. Morris is a great writer - absorbing, insightful, meticulous - and the subject is certainly a fascinating one, and yet I found myself drifting a lot while reading this.
It starts out strong, with a scene from Roosevelt's eventual presidency that we won't revisit until the book that follows this one. (Kind of a tease, right?) But his own story is interesting from the start, too. I tend to gravitate towards the bigger, more 'famous' aspects of someone's life; it's why I read so few biographies, which are often built up around the minutiae of someone's early & home life. Yet oddly, this book grabbed me in the earliest chapters.
However, around the midpoint it began to lose me, and never quite got me back. His family recedes into the background, and the details we get of his quickly evolving career don't congeal into any larger, meaningful driving narrative. I found myself impatient for McKinley to... well, you know.
The energy picks up again towards the end, which makes me torn about reading the next one. His presidency was the draw for me all along - but now I'm a little worn out. I might have fared better by skipping this one, and cutting to the chase by starting with Theodore Rex. Hesitant non-fiction readers may be advised to do the same.
It starts out strong, with a scene from Roosevelt's eventual presidency that we won't revisit until the book that follows this one. (Kind of a tease, right?) But his own story is interesting from the start, too. I tend to gravitate towards the bigger, more 'famous' aspects of someone's life; it's why I read so few biographies, which are often built up around the minutiae of someone's early & home life. Yet oddly, this book grabbed me in the earliest chapters.
However, around the midpoint it began to lose me, and never quite got me back. His family recedes into the background, and the details we get of his quickly evolving career don't congeal into any larger, meaningful driving narrative. I found myself impatient for McKinley to... well, you know.
The energy picks up again towards the end, which makes me torn about reading the next one. His presidency was the draw for me all along - but now I'm a little worn out. I might have fared better by skipping this one, and cutting to the chase by starting with Theodore Rex. Hesitant non-fiction readers may be advised to do the same.