Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [1]
—MALCOLM JONES, Newsweek
“Morris does a masterful job.… No self-respecting novelist would make up such a character.… Roosevelt might wonder why he rates only three volumes from Morris.”
—BOB MINZESHEIMER, USA Today
“Much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of fiction.… Theodore Rex lets Morris be Morris … which is to say one of the most adroit biographers around.”
—RICHARD LACAYO, Time
“The sheer loveliness of [Morris’s] prose, his adept handling of scenes and emotions, his skill at building suspense and managing disclosures, all these talents are manifest in Theodore Rex.… Morris’s unusual skills are a gift.”
—DANIEL AKST, New Jersey Star-Ledger
“Morris writes from inside, presenting everything in scenario fashion, with characters and action and dialogue, in energetic prose, and with little overt authorial presence.”
—NICHOLAS LEMANN, The New Yorker
“What commends Morris’s [book] is not only the sheer richness of TR’s life but the sheer, old-fashioned richness of the writing. Here is wit. Here is irony. And here is the talent to get it all across.… [Morris] has written a book so good that TR himself would have recommended it.”
—RICHARD COHEN, The Washington Post
“His style is reader-friendly and piquant. This is Roosevelt as his often astonished contemporaries observed him.… It’s a shining portrait of a presciently modern political genius maneuvering in a gilded age of wealth, optimism, excess and American global ascension.”
—JOHN CARMAN, San Francisco Chronicle
“Morris has roared back to print with a huge book on Roosevelt’s White House years.… A big, beefy biography of an inexhaustible character.”
—BRUCE CLAYTON, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Morris is above all a portraitist—perhaps the best currently writing.… His metaphors are often apt; at times they are brilliant.”
—H. W. BRANDS, Boston Sunday Globe
“Magnificent … This is a compulsively readable, beautifully measured and paced account. Probably no extended study has better captured Roosevelt’s dynamism, his childlike enthusiasms … his determination to make the presidency the center of national life, his imperial view of his role, his yearning for American empire.”
—MICHAEL SHERRY, Chicago Tribune
“Superb … The new book is every bit as detailed and imaginatively written as its 1979 predecessor.… [Roosevelt’s] very real intellectual and physical appetites were positively Falstaffian.… What distinguishes Theodore Rex is, if anything, not the copious research (there are 180 pages of notes) but rather its deeply novelistic construction, the numerous writerly touches, and the acts of emotional sympathy.… Add to this some smaller touches … and you end up with a biography that’s as good as fiction … a narrative that is well suited in heft, temper, and tone to its vivid subject.”
—DANIEL MENDELSOHN, New York
“Roosevelt’s titanic personality emerges vividly and with a good deal of nuance; the nation he led through a period of turbulent economic, social, and political change proves to have much in common with America at the turn of the twenty-first century.… The narrative moves steadily forward, enriched but seldom slowed by detail.… Morris’s prose is swift and sure, with a good deal of bite.”
—WENDY SMITH, Newsday
“A reader doesn’t have to turn too many pages of this grand biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years before coming to the inescapable conclusion that TR was one of the most fascinating and singularly different presidents in American history.… [Theodore Rex is] brilliantly researched and masterfully told.… Without question, this is the definitive one-volume history of Roosevelt’s presidency.”
—TOM POWERS, The Flint Journal (Michigan)
“A recent C-SPAN poll placed [TR] fourth among all Presidents, behind only Lincoln, Washington and FDR.… Theodore Rex will only consolidate his standing.… It is a huge story, told against the tumultuous