TreeBeard wrote:
Care to share any insights you gleaned from the book? Or any quotable quotes?
Well, you're talking about 2,500 pages, so it covers a lot of material. Theodore Roosevelt is one of those public figures about whom there is an enormous amount of documentation. The books and magazine articles that he wrote during his life fill 24 volumes, add in his private diary, which he started at age 10 and added an entry to almost every day until his death 50 years later, to his private correspondence, to his public addresses, not counting all the stuff he said and did while president, easily fill a small library. Then you have Roosevelt's numerous famous friends and admirers, such as Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Willam Howard Taft, Booker T Washington, the list just goes on and on, and you see just how difficult a task it must be to try to write a biography of the man. I am not at all surprised that it took Edmund Morris over 30 years to write his account, frankly, I'm surprised it didn't take longer.
What I did find interesting is that a lot TR's political opponents considered him to mentally ill, and, after reading the accounts of some of the stuff he did, like giving a two-hour speech in front of a crowd of thousands while bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in his chest that he suffered at the hands of an attempted assassin, to attempting to volunteer to go on the front lines in World War I at the age of 58, when he was already ill and would die of natural causes a little more than a year later, to his public speeches such as his address accepting the Progressive party nomination in 1912 where he proclaimed that 'we stand at armageddon and we battle for the Lord' (and I thought that Obama's rhetoric in 2008 was messianic!

) and his extraordinarily vicious public attacks on Woodrow Wilson, I can totally understand why so many of enemies thought he was insane. I'm pretty sure he wasn't actually mentally ill, but some of his behavior seemed rather eccentric and extreme, so I can totally understand why many assumed the worst and just thought the guy was nuts.