Colonel Roosevelt

What a remarkable man Theodore Roosevelt was: author, explorer, naturalist, hunter, statesman, politician, soldier, scholar, loving husband, parent, and grandparent. In the last decade of his life, covered by this third volume of Edmund Morris's expansive biography, TR plunged into all those roles with gusto, yet a cloud of frustration and sadness hung over his life. He failed in his efforts to win reelection to the presidency, his health declined, the Wilson administration rejected his offer to lead a volunteer regiment into battle in France, and his son Quentin was killed in aerial combat. The book opens with a wonderful image of Roosevelt seated on a special observation bench mounted over the cowcatcher on a British East Africa Railway engine pulling his safari train up-country from Mombasa, Kenya. In a fast-paced chapter Morris catalogs Roosevelt's slaughter of wildlife—shocking to a modern reader—and reports on the colonel's thoughtful observations of natural phenomena and the lives of the people he met. Other brilliant chapters depict his triumphal tour among the courts and royalty of Europe and his incredibly dangerous descent of the River of Doubt in Brazil three years later

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