Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (Hardcover)

by Kathleen Dalton (Author) "AMERICAN PRESIDENTS are not supposed to start out in life the way Theodore Roosevelt did..." (more)
Key Phrases: own national soul, moral frontier, sedition bill, New York, Rough Riders, Great War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Biographers have often treated Theodore Roosevelt as "a larger-than-life monument carved in stone, unchanging, far from being flesh and blood, and quite imperturbable." So writes Kathleen Dalton, who gives us a fully fleshed, quite down-to-earth TR in this vigorous, sometimes critical biography of the 26th president.

Roosevelt carefully crafted an image of himself as a self-made man. Fair enough, Dalton suggests, though he had a big head start in coming from one of New York's wealthiest and best-connected families. More than shaping his body to overcome weakness, his spirit to overcome fear, he had to overcome the prejudices of his time and class in order to be truly fit for leadership, and even as president he wrestled with a few contradictions (opposing, for instance, a woman's right to divorce, but endorsing public flogging of spousal abusers). He was not always successful, Dalton writes, but he emerged in the end as a great champion of civil rights and of the middle and working classes, very much ahead of his time.

There's a lot of interest in Theodore Roosevelt these days--and for good reason, given the recent international turmoil and financial tumble, which, some would argue, beg for TR's patented big-stick and trust-busting treatment. Dalton's Theodore Roosevelt offers a satisfying portrait of a constantly fascinating subject. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Dalton, a history instructor at Phillips Academy, Andover, seems determined to cut TR down to size and drain his life of color in this dry, questionably reasoned biography. She complains that other books about Roosevelt "are often rich with dramatic adventure and colorful scenes, just as the Bull Moose would have wanted." With this in mind, she sets herself apart from established TR biographers, who she believes have been duped into perpetuating the autobiographical canards of their self-mythologizing subject. Thus Dalton devotes vast chunks of prose to debunking many of the most popular Theodore Roosevelt images common from books by such writers as Edmund Morris and David McCullough. Unfortunately, the shaky foundation Dalton offers instead seems incapable of carrying so full a load as the life of Theodore Roosevelt. In the final analysis, Dalton offers an unsatisfying, one-dimensional definition of TR's complex psychology. She sees him as little more than an overgrown and preposterous boy: a boy who always gets into trouble, a boy who never asks for or follows advice, a boy who needs constant supervision. By the end of the book, it seems a wonder that Dalton's self-centered and fractious TR ever achieved the White House, wrote books that became classics, won the Nobel Peace Prize, set aside millions of acres for conservation, or loomed large on any stage other than that of his own imagination. 32 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 752 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067944663X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679446637
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.7 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #505,246 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars TR rides again , September 15, 2004

By	John Harrison (Potomac, Md. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the only biography of Theodore Roosevelt that I have read that was written by a woman and I have read over ten. How a man's man like TR avoided this all of these years is a mystery. While the book itself is certainly well written much more important is that it has some very interesting insights into the character of an intriguing man. No one that is honest, and Ms. Dalton certainly appears such, could make Theodore Roosevelt's life story boring, egocentric, certainly, prissy, occasionally, but boring, never. The reviewer above that states otherwise is simply wrong. This is an interesting, well written book with many valid observations.

Ms. Dalton succeeds in conveying a view of TR that other historians have missed, or glossed over, or never saw. I can't tell if this is because of better scholarship, use of new or previously undiscovered sources, or simply because as a woman she was more sensitive to these issues than the other biographers that I have read. In any event it makes no difference since her insights do much to explain TR's life. In the past biographers focused on what happened, and so much happened to TR in such a short time that they often missed explaining the why part of TR's story. Ms. Dalton does this very well.

Frankly I resisted buying this book because I had already read so many others about TR that I wondered how Ms. Dalton could have enough new to say to justify the time of reading another long biography of TR. She justified my investment in time very well. So, much so that when a new books comes out by Kathleen Dalton I will buy that too.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE Theodore Roosevelt biography for our time, September 29, 2003

By	Mark Klobas (Tempe, AZ, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

With this book, Kathleen Dalton has produced the best one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt we are likely to see for some time. Hers is a work about Roosevelt the person, not the image or caricature that is so often reduced to in the public mind. As a result, she has provided a valuable work examining the man behind the famous myth - a myth that Roosevelt himself did so much to construct.

The process begins in sorting the distortions surrounding his childhood. The product of study going back to her dissertation written over a quarter century ago on Roosevelt's pre-presidential years, this is one of the strongest sections of the book. Unlike Edmund Morris in his ongoing opus, Dalton fits the young TR squarely into the context of his times, showing how he reflected many of the prevailing Victorian attitudes about youth and manhood. Moreover. her Roosevelt is not the paragon of manliness that Morris' is. She goes further in detailing the poor health that plagued Roosevelt throughout his life (such as his attacks of asthma, which Dalton notes that, contrary to TR's own account, he never overcame completely) and from which he constantly sought to escape - hence the theme of her book, the "strenuous life" of her subtitle.

Dalton also details the early years of Roosevelt's political career with considerable insight. She describes how Roosevelt was very much his father's son, with the elder Roosevelt encouraging his namesake to take up the cause of social reform from an early age. This formed a key component of his political career from its start with his election as a New York state legislator. Yet Dalton shows that Roosevelt was much more than the typical patrician reformer of his time. The critical period in the development was his tenure as a New York City police commissioner. Not only did he gain greater exposure to how the "other half" of New York society lived, but Dalton credits his experience with the infighting of the job in preparing him for the harsher aspects of political life later on.

Dalton's account becomes more disjointed once TR becomes president. Here it is as if she is swept away by the breathless pace of the Roosevelt White House, as she continually shifts between hurried explanations of the political problems Roosevelt faced and descriptions of his family life. Events and people often are referenced in passing without adequate explanation, which can leave the reader guessing at the relevancy and significance of her point. Yet while the frenetic nature of the account can be annoying, it does help in her effort to convey the physical toll the job took on TR, one which became increasingly apparent as his term came to an end.

Once Roosevelt moves into his post-presidential years, Dalton regains her focus. Here she gives extensive coverage to TR's continuing fight for domestic reform. Though Roosevelt spent more than a year abroad in order to give his successor, William Howard Taft, the freedom to operate away from his considerable shadow, he found himself unable to avoid the political arena after his return. Dalton chronicles Roosevelt's adoption of an increasingly radical agenda during this period, one that included the adoption of income and inheritance taxes, workers' rights, and direct democracy - ideas that were anathema to the conservative leadership of the Republican Party.

Thwarted in his attempt to wrest the presidential nomination away from Taft, Roosevelt broke away from the Republican Party and ran for the White House in 1912 as the Progressive Party candidate. Though ultimately defeated in the race by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt continued to fight for political reform and racial justice. Dalton argues that this struggle in the final years of Roosevelt's life has been overshadowed in most historians' accounts by his campaign for American involvement in the First World War, one which saw a more chauvinistic figure than the champion of progressivism which TR had become. In the end, though, TR's efforts to regain the presidency and press forward with his policies would end with his unexpected death in 1919 after a lifetime of battles and illnesses, the result of the "strenuous life" that has made him the icon he is today.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for today's world, October 27, 2002

By A Customer

I'm not an historian--my doctorate is in literature--so take the following for what it's worth.

A Strenuous Life is a very impressive work, delightful in the way it spins its tale, exciting in its revelations of TR as a human being surrounded by other human beings at home as well as at work, and important in the parallels it leads us to draw between the real Roosevelt and the image current politicians conjure up of him to support their goals.

Kathleen Dalton weaves a fascinating tale of a complex individual--scientist, politician, leader, husband, father, idealist and pragmatist. In many ways the most intriguing "plot line" is Roosevelt's insistence on fairness and justice. As a young man he was introduced to the squalid conditions of New York City immigrants by photographer/journalist Jacob Riis. That revelation enflamed Roosevelt's intense sense of justice that led him to crusade for the underprivileged, laying the groundwork for his courageous stands against the abuses of big business.

Roosevelt's career almost seems the stuff of fiction with its improbable career story line--naturalist to politician to cowboy to soldier to president to explorer to third party challenger; and Dalton's writing has the lilt of the best fiction. But TR was real and Dalton's incredibly detailed and documented history provides an important reality check to the glibly portrayed Roosevelt of myth and legend. After reading A Strenuous Life one almost feels one knows Roosevelt well enough to say to some current politicians, "I knew Theodore Roosevelt...and you, sir, are no Theodore Roosevelt."