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American Presidents

TR: On Recent Books about Theodore Roosevelt

Assuredly our twenty-sixth American president is far from being forgotten. On the contrary, of late there has been positively a resurgence of historical interest in him. Kathleen Dalton's new biography, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (2002), is one of the best of at least a half dozen studies to appear within the past ten years. The year before, Edmund Morris published Theodore Rex (2001), covering TR's White House years, the second volume of what, when completed, seems likely be the definitive three-volume assessment. Louis Auchincloss has written a brief, unremarkable biographical summary, Theodore Roosevelt, in a series entitled American Presidents (2002). H. W. Brands's biography, T.R.: The Last Romantic, appeared in 1997, and The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War, by Edward J. Renehan, Jr., in 1998. David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback (1981), an account of TR's younger days, has been reissued with a new introduction (2001). TR plays a commanding role in Warren Zimmerman's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (2002) and in James Chace's 1912 (2004).