David’s Reviews > Colonel Roosevelt > Status Update

Edmund Morris's three-volume biography of TR is a masterpiece. You can learn a lot about how America and the world became what they are today through the story of TR's life. TR was simply extraordinary -- not all good or all bad, and certainly a major actor on a world stage.

More than 250,000 dead in the first month of WWI!

"a hurricane of steel," "the smell of a half-million unbathed men" marching through Brussels -- Morris quotes many powerful impressions of WWI.

It's amazing how heads of state continue to try to curry favor with TR, a mere former president. In my memory, no former president's opinion has counted for much -- unless it's the posthumous views of Reagan channeled (and invented) by his would-be acolytes.

A former president exploring the uncharted Rio Dúvida in the Brazilian Amazon -- we'll never see TR's like again -- for better or worse.

As a "former great chief," TR is privileged to enter a pit of rattlesnakes as part of a Hopi ceremony -- a rare honor for a white man.

Obama had his shellacking but Taft had "not only a landslide, but a tidal wave and a holocaust all rolled into one general cataclysm."

All the progressives want TR to run again but Wall Street is much more comfortable with Taft.

Roosevelt is in the veldt!