Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt

Book excerpt: Praise for the original edition “Theodore Roosevelt in all his infinite variety—the vitality of him, the charm, the humor, the intellectual avidity, the love of people, the flattering devotion to his country. To a surprising degree the personality flashes before the reader as it flashed in life before his contemporaries.” —Hermann Hagedorn, friend and biographer of Theodore Roosevelt; Secretary and Director, Theodore Roosevelt Association, 1919–1957 A Classic Biography of Theodore Roosevelt—Reissued on the Sesquicentennial of His Birth This classic biography—copublished by the Theodore Roosevelt Association and The Lyons Press—includes an introduction by distinguished Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris, and historical photographs from the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University. The seven Rooseveltian worlds Wagenknecht explores are those of Action, Human Relations, Thought, Family, Spiritual Values, Public Affairs, and War and Peace. As Morris observes in his introduction, Wagenknecht conveys every “interesting, spectacular, poignant, admirable, and . . . distressing or even pathological” aspect of Theodore Roosevelt without ever sentimentalizing him. As he also notes, “Wagenknecht came to grips with the centripetal personality coalescing from all this material by viewing it as a sort of biographical solar system—seven contrasting, yet gravitationally linked, ‘worlds’”—worlds that come together with compelling force in this remarkable volume