Product Description

Theodore Roosevelt made himself the hero of his own strenuous life. He transformed himself from a sickly and fearful patrician boy into a fiercely adventurous--and always active--hunter, sportsman, writer, politician, and finally president. But one self-making was never enough for TR. He slowly fashioned himself into a man of the people, a defender of the poor and downtrodden, and a prophet of political ideas advanced for his day. This is the story of his personal and political development, of one man's struggle to conquer his own fears and to build a greater nation out of a divided collection of states. He urged America to engage life to the utmost, as he did.

Kathleen Dalton's Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life incorporates the latest scholarship into a vigorous narrative. It stands as the only full-length biography to use manuscripts recently discovered in Roosevelt attics. Dalton sheds new light on young Theodore's life during the Civil War and his fascination with the new natural history, his shame over his father's failure to enlist in the Union army, his struggle to achieve manhood, and his desperate pursuit of and sometimes less than idyllic marriage to Alice Hathaway Lee, the daughter of a banking magnate, when she was seventeen. Her death four years later left Roosevelt a grieving widower and father at twenty-six, and he went west to make himself a cowboy and western writer, before he could recommit himself to a new life and a new love in the East.

No other biographer has described how formative Roosevelt's marriage to Edith Carow proved to be in shaping his political career. In an account that may be compared with Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin, Dalton demonstrates how Edith and Theodore's marriage, with its ups and downs, remade our history. In partnership with Massachusetts political mastermind Henry Cabot Lodge, Edith served as her husband's advisor, image builder, conscience, and at times censor. Dalton unravels the complex relationship between Roosevelt's initial political conservatism and the growing mood of progressivism that swept the nation in the early 1900s. He found unlikely allies among the army of women reformers who campaigned for pure milk and clean streets in the cities, and by 1912 he had become an active suffragist.

Out of this biography emerges a new picture of the Progressive Era, of state-building and reform won in partnership between TR and activists such as Jane Addams and Frances Kellor. In his political maturity Roosevelt aspired to be the builder of the modern American welfare state in order to give industrial workers a better life and at the same time to stand up more forcefully against the arrogance and greed of large corporations. Dalton shows how TR called for a revival of American arts and letters, and how his career as a scientist affected his reform program and his views on race, and how toward the end of his life he finally commited himself to the cause of racial equality. Both an updated political interpretation and an intimate personal story of a loving but difficult man, his wife, his family, and his loyal friends, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life will change persuasively the way we see this great and complex man and his times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #444902 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-08
• Released on: 2002-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 752 pages

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.

From Library Journal
As America's 20th-century Renaissance president, Theodore Roosevelt writer, naturalist, historian, rancher, explorer, and soldier was also a politician whom many scholars rank among the top five presidents. Dalton (history, Phillips Academy, Andover) establishes her niche as a major presidential biographer in this tour de force of Roosevelt's life from birth to death. Her stunning portrayal presents a realistic and balanced view that challenges traditional interpretations. With insight and skill she puts in perspective the influence of his lifelong asthma and moodiness. He did not abandon daughter Alice, nor did he refuse to talk about his first wife. After his African safari, TR toured Europe to learn about pioneering efforts in social legislation there, much of which he later tried to adapt to the United States. Contrary to the "Bully!" caricature, the author presents a rugged but complex individual who, though capable of serious blunders, thoroughly enjoyed life and politics. This book is certain to intrigue both scholars and the public. David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback leaves Roosevelt's story in 1886; Edmund Morris's study (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt; Theodore Rex) is two volumes and counting. Dalton's is the best one-volume biography on Roosevelt. A pleasure to read; highly recommended for all libraries. William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

TR rides again
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.

THE Theodore Roosevelt biography for our time
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.

Great book for today's world
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."