Saturday, May 15, 2010

Five best books about statesmen

Evan Thomas is the author of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst and the Rush to Empire, 1898.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books on statesmen. One title on the list:
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris

Edmund Morris virtually inhabits his subject in "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" (the first book in a three-volume series that will conclude later this year). His feel for Roosevelt—a bragging, bullying, bellowing, yet somehow tender and always steadfast young man—is so tactile that it verges on the sensuous. "He was dubbed 'The Chief of the Dudes,' and satirized as a tight-trousered snob given to sucking the knob of his ivory cane," Morris writes. This volume, about the pre-presidential Roosevelt, is more engaging than the one that followed. Presidential biographies are almost inherently heavy going because presidents must always be doing too many things at once. But Morris, like TR, is never dull.
Read about another book on the list.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt appears on Edward Dolnick's list of five nonfiction books with brilliant opening chapters.

--Marshal Zeringue