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.