Two and a third books: Theodore Roosevelt, Louise Penny, and Stephen King

13 & 14. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) (7/14/26) and Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning (2016) (7/19/26) — and a brief comment about Stephen King, Fairy Tale (2022)

I spent a good three months tackling the 780-page first volume of Morris's ambitious trilogy about Theodore Roosevelt (920 pages with notes, bibliography, and index). It took a while for several reasons, chief among them being that I have no attention span anymore. Plus, I took a couple of trips during those three months, during which I read pretty much not at all. And I picked up one decadent little thriller halfway through, just to charge my reading batteries. But I persisted, because The Rise of TR is a fascinating book about a fascinating man—and I didn't even make it to the part where he's president! (That comes in volume two.) 

No, that's not entirely true: the prologue covers New Year's Day 1907, six years into his presidency, and the epilogue covers the moment in September 1901 when, as vice president, he learns that President McKinley has died from an assassin's bullet. The rest, all 28 chapters, takes us from his birth in October 1858 through, variously, his childhood (as a somewhat sickly boy); his undergraduate years at Harvard; his romance and marriage to Alice Lee Hathaway, birth of his daughter, and several chapters on, Alice Lee's death; his election as a New York assemblyman; his repeat visits to North Dakota, where he had a herd of cattle and became an accomplished hunter; his embrace of the Republican Party, and the various alliances he forged, and rivalries as well; his candidacy for mayor of New York City when he was 28; his prolific career as a writer of history and biography; his several-year stint as U.S. Civil Service commissioner; oh, and in there he married Edith Carow, who had child after child after child; his service as president of the New York City Police Board. By now he's made quite a name for himself, and old enmities and scuffles with the political machinery in New York start getting more and more troublesome. He soon returns to federal service as assistant secretary of the navy, where he is far from an isolationist. When war breaks out with Spain over Cuba, he resigns and dons a uniform—and assembles both cowboys and Ivy Leaguers to form the Rough Riders, one regiment of which he eventually leads up San Juan Hill. Back home, he wins the governorship of New York, and things go fine for a year, but soon that old machine starts gumming up the works of his reformist plans. The best option is to run on President McKinley's second-term ticket—though he loathes the idea of serving in a do-nothing, ceremonial job. Still, he realizes that regular party politics will stymie him at the local or state level. And so he follows that path. 

The book is beautifully researched and full of wonderful anecdotes, quotes, characters, and events. I sometimes got a little lost in the politics (due in part to my slow reading pace, no doubt), but then some more earthy escapade would rescue me. I am looking forward to the second volume, Theodore Rex—though at the moment I feel like I need to get my old reading chops back. And what better sort of project than light fluffy fiction?

Like Louise Penny's twelfth Inspector Gamache mystery set in the tiny Québec village of Three Pines. It had been a couple of years since I'd read Penny, and this one to a degree picks up where an earlier volume left off—with Gamache tackling corruption at the highest levels of the Sûreté, Québec's provincial police force. This time, it's at the Súreté's training academy, which Gamache has been recruited to head and which he hopes to reform. We meet several professors, a couple of whom Gamache hires despite checkered pasts, and several "cadets," both brand-new and third-years, who may have been tainted by the academy's previous director. Then, that director is murdered. Throughout the investigation, which involves an old map (yay, map!), an outside observer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an anachronistic revolver, and a stained glass window, we are treated to the delightful interactions of Gamache's friends in Three Pines and the sleuthing of his variously professional colleagues. It ended up with a couple of satisfying twists. 

The best part was, I sat down and just read. Over a few days, but at least it didn't take months. And I got engrossed, which is really all I ask for in a book. It was a relief to take a good break from my phone and laptop. 

And then there's Stephen King's Fairy Tale, which I listened to, on the recommendation of my sister-in-law. And I was enjoying it—the narrator is very good, and the story—a teenager saves an old man who's fallen down the stairs and broken his leg, and they become friends, and there's a trusty old dog as well—grabbed my attention. But then the old man dies, and a magical—fairy-tale—world is revealed that the teenager decides he must visit, and . . . I lost interest. I guess I prefer reality, or at least not flat-out make-believe. So I found the plot summary in Wikipedia, which saved me a good fifteen hours of listening, and learned that all's well that ends well, which is good enough for me. 

Now, back to the alphabet, and a short collection of essays whose title starts with, yes, S. Report coming soon!

Berlin & Oslo—a photo/travelogue

As I do, here's my summary of the travelogue photos I posted on Facebook recently, as we toured Berlin and Oslo.

On this trip, the days flowed together, so I present you with two groupings:

Berlin:
day 1
day 2
day 3
day 4, with a tour of the East Side Gallery (an art installation on a portion of the Wall)
day 5

Transit day: Berlin to Oslo

Oslo:
day 1
day 2, which ended up in three parts because of internet issues: 1, 2, and 3 (dinner)
day 3 
day 4
day 5
day 6

It was a wonderful trip. I've always wanted to visit Berlin, and it was so interesting and satisfying. Oslo was about family time, and revisiting familiar places. 

Madison Grant, All-American white supremacist

Yesterday on FB I posted a quote from the biography of Theodore Roosevelt that I'm reading, to wit:

A NYC newspaper editor had this to say about a certain politician: "Stop [him] talking! Why, you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it." 

The editor then went on to say, "But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant—inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it."

And I asked—the initial observation of course bringing to mind Trump, but the subsequent characterization reminding us of anyone but—whether any of my readers had a guess as to who was being described?

My friend the writer BK Loren got it right off, with the added comment that Roosevelt "also leaned heavily white supremacist." She wrote, "I wonder if most people know that about him? He and Madison Grant ☞ saved the redwoods at least partially because they thought they represented the superior white race. The book Madison wrote was used by Hitler and Anders Breivik to justify their heinous acts." And she referred me to an essay (from 2015) by Duke University law professor Jedidiah Purdy, "Environmentalism's Racist History," discussing Grant.

This particular Grant is not mentioned in either volume one or two of the book I'm reading; maybe he's in volume three, but maybe too he slipped under the biographer, Edmund Morris's radar. That series was published between 1979 and 2010, and Morris no doubt had to jettison just as much juicy material as he kept, TR being rather larger than life. But perhaps Morris didn't run into Grant, or didn't consider him worthy of mention? 

As Purdy puts it, Grant (1865–1937), "like many young men of his vintage, felt duty-bound to do more than enjoy his privilege. He made himself a credible wildlife zoologist, was instrumental in creating the Bronx Zoo, and founded the first organizations dedicated to preserving American bison and the California redwoods." But what he's better known for today is his 1915 book The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, in which he warns of the decline of the "Nordic" peoples, whom he considered "a natural aristocracy, marked by noble, generous instincts and a gift for political self-governance" (as Purdy paraphrases). This book was admired by Hitler, who called it his "Bible" (which, Purdy observes, "has given it permanent status on the ultra-right"), and it influenced the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, restricting immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and outright banning migrants from the Middle East and Asia. 

In the FB discussion, herpetologist Harry Greene also cited a more recent (June 26 repost) profile of Grant, by Richard Conniff, "The All-American White Supremacist Role Model." 

I am posting all this because I want to read both those commentaries, and what better place to store the links—and potentially find them again!—than here.

I will also say that TR, at the very least (I have no opinion of Grant yet), was a man of his time and class. Which is not to excuse him for having entitled, no doubt racist beliefs. He was certainly a (white) American exceptionalist, yet his biography also shows ways in which his thoughts evolved and changed. And we do have to thank him for championing our environment, even if one reason for his doing so is anathema today. From what I've learned of him so far, I would not call him a white supremacist. As Morris puts it more accurately, he was an aristocratic paternalist, though even that shifted in 1898–99 with his "military catharsis" on San Juan Hill, when he lived closer to his men than his superior officers.  

As for Trump,  Conniff comments, "The difference between Madison Grant & Donald Trump? Grant at least accomplished some good in his life, as a wildlife conservationist, before turning utterly bad."

And . . . I'm glad now to have discovered Conniff's Substack. It looks like it has all sorts of interesting reads.

Not really a book report: Solar

12. Ian McEwan, Solar (2010) (6/28/26)

As I've mentioned before, I don't listen to books. But I have an Audible account (don't ask me why), and back in May a writer friend said she had enjoyed listening to Solar by Ian McEwan. I'd read Atonement by McEwan, and was impressed by it. So I loaded Solar into my queue, and one day when I couldn't find an appealing podcast to listen to on my more or less daily walk, I decided to give it a go.

I was not hooked, exactly—but once I'm walking, if I don't have to stop and fiddle with my phone (and as I said, I didn't have any immediate alternatives), I just keep listening. 

This occurred a few times, at intervals. So given the combination of me being a distracted listener—when I'm walking, I'm always visually engaged, looking for a photo of the day—and of having no real sense of the structure of the book—"chapters" were enumerated on my screen, but my ear couldn't really discern starting and stopping points for such, it all just seemed to flow like a braided stream—and of listening to it in maybe a half dozen sessions over the course of weeks . . . I'm afraid I have a very diaphanous impression of this book. 

But it all starts and ends with an overall antipathy toward the main character, physicist Michael Beard, Nobel Laureate—but also narcissist, stealer of ideas, framer-for-murder, womanizer, and generally unpleasant specimen of manhood. And he doesn't improve.

The story is also sort of about climate change, and trying to tackle the problem—but Beard doesn't really believe in climate change, he's just stumbled on someone else's attempt at a solution. And he decides to implement it. Why not? 

In the end, everything falls to bits. The final paragraph caught me by surprise (at least with a print book you can anticipate that you're coming to the end, but here: it just ended, what?). And I cared not a whit. The overall mood of the book is one of cynicism. And I don't need more cynicism in my life.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book was the epilogue, the address at the Swedish Academy outlining Michael Beard's accomplishments in physics (with a dash of Richard Feynman) as he's awarded his Nobel Prize. And then there was an interview with McEwan, talking about the book—hearing about the writerly process was interesting. For example, that a somewhat random chapter about a visit to the far north of Norway to view climate change in action was based on a trip McEwan himself took, which in turn became the initial inspiration/instigation for the book—that was worth learning about. And it turned out the Swedish Academy address wasn't even written by McEwan, but by a physicist friend of his. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.

So far, listening to audiobooks, I've been really glad I took on Percival Everett's James—that book was, I think, enhanced by the reading voice. The Testament of Mary was wonderful as read by Meryl Streep, but I wonder if it might not have been a teeny bit better if I'd simply imagined my own voice of Mary as I read the words on the page. With Solar, I suspect I would have quit reading, turned off by the protagonist. So it's only the narrator who kept me going. Something to do while walking. But maybe simple silence, being with my own thoughts, would have been a better alternative. But no, I'm glad I listened to Solar. It at least made me consider how one might pull off an unsympathetic character, and make you care. It's possible, I know.

Travel again, 25 years on

In 2001 we traveled to southern Africa, the lure being a total eclipse (on June 21) in Zimbabwe. But while we were in the area, we figured we'd stick around. After two weeks on the eclipse tour, we spent another two weeks in Botswana on another tour that I booked through a South African company (in those days, the internet was still a place where you might be interacting with a dog, who knew? but in this case the random selection worked out just fine and we had a marvelous excursion through various national parks, including the exquisite Okavango Delta), and finally two weeks in Namibia with a South African climber I also rustled up on the internet, Richard Behne—in order to do some climbing. It was a trip of a lifetime. Here we are in Zimbabwe (note the elephants), then in Namibia atop Spitzkoppe, the highest mountain in the country, and on the Wattenberg plateau.

Back then, I was still using a film camera, so the photos I took were slides, some of which I digitized—but apparently didn't save at full resolution. They're blurry and grainy, but they give some idea of some of what captivated us. For the following photos, you can go here to see the images individually and for some description.

I would love to return to that part of the world—and next time, I'd like to go to the Garden Coast of South Africa, in springtime. Maybe it'll happen. Who knows?

Book Report: London Rules

11. Mick Herron, London Rules (2018)

Ha, I see that with the last Slow Horses report, I was also slogging my way through a long nonfiction book (which I also realize I never finished, uh oh). This time, it's a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Which I am feeling quite happy to get back to now, after this retreat into fantastical fiction. I'm ready again for the real world—though not necessarily the real world I happen to live in. Then again, no, that's not true: the real world I live in is just fine. It's the real world of the headlines that I'd just as soon keep avoiding. (Though today does bring some reasonably good news as the Republicans begin to show a bit of spine. Let's see what happens tomorrow—or just later today . . .)

In any case, back to London Rules, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Mick Herron is a helluva writer, and storyteller. And once again, the TV series with Gary Oldman kept flashing through my head as I read, and once again, I enjoyed the difference between the story on the page and the dramatized screenplay. Also, it helps to be able to "see" the characters so well. 

The story here begins with a terrorist attack in a village in England, and then moves on to other seemingly random acts of violence (including the murder of 18 penguins and an accidental death by falling paint can), which the Slow Horses manage to make sense of—and which point to a leak within the Secret Service itself. Of course, it's not so simple as sabotage, nor is everything under any kind of control. Though things do work out in the end and Jackson Lamb keeps the upper hand. 

And now, back to Teddy, who is about to take a long break in the wilds of "Dakota."

My Colbert Questionnaire

Sure, I'll bite—because it's fun. And even though I didn't watch The Late Show (except randomly on FB shares), I will miss Stephen Colbert. I also fully anticipate that he has something up his sleeve that will delight us . . .  I would say all, but we know that a good 30 percent of this country does not begin to understand or even want to care about Colbert or his humor or those to whom his humor appeals. So anyway, here we go:

1. What is the best sandwich?

"Best" is difficult to define, but I do know that if I go to a restaurant and it's lunchtime and tuna melt is on the menu, that's what I order.

2. What was the first concert you attended?

Jethro Tull, with Steeleye Span as opener, 1973. SS's Gaudete knocked me for a loop. It was Tull's "Passion Play" tour. (And as a caveat, I should say that I attended plenty of classical music concerts, as well as music theater, growing up, with my mom. Here I'm singling out my first popular music concert with friends.)

3. What is the scariest animal?

I was not exactly attacked by a mama javelina in Arizona once, but man, yeah, she was scary.

4. Apples or oranges?

Apples. Crunch.

5. Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?

Jean-Claude Killy, the skier, at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It would've been about 1969. I have seen a few other famous people (Ronald Reagan, Laurence Fishburne, Sean Penn, the Dalai Lama) at various venues, but I was no longer an autograph seeker. Not that I ever really was. I think my father was more interested in that autograph than I was . . .

6. What do you think happens when we die?

What Keanu Reaves said.

7. Favorite action movie?

Die Hard. (Me and George Clooney and Ethan Hawke, just sayin'.)

8. Window or aisle seat?

Window.

9. Favorite smell?

Petrichor.

10. Least favorite smell?

Oh please.

11. What is your earliest memory?

I'm afraid it was when in nursery school I peed my pants and had to be sent home. Though you know I'm sitting here searching for something better. Like, I really wish I remembered being terrorized by the emu at the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary in Victoria, Australia, on my third birthday, when it did its best to pluck the red ribbon out of my hair, but all I have is stories to that effect. . . . (And I'm making up the red detail there, because the photographs-as-proof are all in b&w.)

12. Cats or dogs?

Both. We have (had: our beloved Milo, 15, died in January) both, and they both bring different joys. I'm not going to choose. Currently, the cats are trying to be dogs. Well, one of them is. Really hard.

13. If you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what is it?

Mozart's 21st piano concerto. 

14. What number am I thinking of? (Often Colbert's number is 3)

18 (that's my number. I don't care what Colbert's is)

15. Describe the rest of your life in five words.

Curious, relaxed, exploring, appreciating, connecting. (At least, that's what I'd like to aspire to. To quote at rather more length from a blog post of March 2016,  I hope to "keep expanding, exploring, leaping, trusting, risking, trying, while always seeking my center." Yeah. All that.)