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In his time there was no national figure more popular than Theodore Roosevelt. It was not only the energy he brought to political office that made him so popular, or his unshakable moral convictions or even his stature as an authentic war hero -- the colonel who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. Though scion of a privileged New York family, he was a man with an uncommon common touch. Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the American people because he loved them.Yet, as H.W. Brands shows in this groundbreaking biography, an examination of the private life of Roosevelt reveals an individual whose great public strengths hid troubling personal deficiencies. His uncomprimising moralism frequently dismayed friends and alienated those who might have been allies. His speeches and writings, reflecting a temperament obsessively full of itself, became targets of fierce satire. His historical works, paeans to heroism, typically displayed a fierce and belligerent nationalism.Even more revealing is Roosevelt as son, brother, husband and father. To understand Roosevelt requires an appreciation of the impact his father's premature death, which denied him the opportunity to come to terms with his own manhood. When his first wife, Alice, died of complications during childbirth, leaving behind a baby daughter, he responded by fleeing to the frontier. Even as his second wife, Edith, lay seriously ill, he rushed from her bedside to fulfill a childhood fantasy of soldiering. His primary concern as his brother Elliott spiraled to alcoholic destruction was that his own name not be marred with scandal. Denied the opportunity to court a hero's death in World War I, he sent his four sons to battle in his place -- and one to the death he himself half longed for.The compelling drama of Theodore Roosevelt's life continues to fascinate readers, and H. W. Brands, employing a wealth of private letters and previously unpublished material, tells his story as no biographer before him has. Meticulously researched, beautifully written and powerfully motivated by its subject, T.R.ı is a biography destined to become a classic.

"Extensively researched and psychologically penetrating."

Kirkus

"[An] energetic and capacious biography."

T. H. Watkins, Washington Post Book World, 01/18/1998

T.R: The Last Romantic: Search Results