Colonel Roosevelt, Morris Edmund

Автор: Morris Edmund
Название: Colonel Roosevelt
ISBN: 0375504877 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780375504877
Издательство: Random House (USA)
Цена: 24520.00 T
Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain "Colonel Roosevelt," he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. "If I see another king," he joked, "I think I shall bite him."

Had TR won his historic "Bull Moose" campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin's bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?

Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his "journey into the Pleistocene"--a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR's bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.

Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous "New Nationalism" speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR's fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel "was the greatest man I ever knew.")

Then follows a detailed account of TR's reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR's literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913-1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures--from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man's universality. The Colonel himself remarked, "I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know."

Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved--the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. "He is just like a big boy--there is a sweetness about him that you can't resist." That makes the story of TR's last year, when the "boy" in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.

Автор: Morris Edmund
Название: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
ISBN: 1400069653 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781400069651
Издательство: Random House (USA)
Цена: 24520.00 T
Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: Described by the "Chicago Tribune" as "a classic," The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001 marks the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt becoming president.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Автор: Morris, Edmund
Название: Theodore Rex
ISBN: 0812966007 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780812966008
Издательство: Random House (USA)
Цена: 13490.00 T
Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A shining portrait of a presciently modern political genius maneuvering in a gilded age of wealth, optimism, excess and American global ascension."--San Francisco Chronicle

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY - "[Theodore Rex] is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams's volumes on Jefferson and Madison."--Times Literary Supplement

Theodore Rex is the story--never fully told before--of Theodore Roosevelt's two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, "TR" succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism. Youngest of all our chief executives, he rallied a stricken nation with his superhuman energy, charm, and political skills. He proceeded to combat the problems of race and labor relations and trust control while making the Panama Canal possible and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But his most historic achievement remains his creation of a national conservation policy, and his monument millions of acres of protected parks and forest.

Theodore Rex ends with TR leaving office, still only fifty years old, his future reputation secure as one of our greatest presidents.