Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

[Checkman]

The second installment of Edmund Morris's biographical trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt. Densely written, well researched and with excellent research notes Theodore Rex is a serious piece of political biography. I'm not a slow reader, but I took my time going through this one. Political biographies can be challenging for me. All the in-fighting and maneuvering can be tedious at times, but also fascinating. It just isn't fast reading for me. In some respects the book is rather old-fashioned in it's writing style and layout, but I found it refreshing for this very reason. This is a book meant to be read a few chapters at a time. Not something you blow through while waiting at the doctor's office or on the family Christmas visit. Morris didn't write a book for the smartphone and twitter crowd (I appreciate the fact that I'm using social media/technology to post this review). There is nothing brief or vapid in his writing. If you're interested in Theodore Roosevelt and the Ragtime era I recommend this book. Actually the entire trilogy which I'm reading backwards from the end to the beginning. Why? Just because. I recommend the trilogy as companion piece for Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America, Ragtime, An American Tragedy and The Jungle. The works are fiction and non-fiction and were written during different decades over the past 110 years (approximately), but together they can give you a very interesting look at America when the nineteenth century became the twentieth.