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Theodore Roosevelt is easily one of the most confounding and complex subjects for modern historians to explain, and I believe I know why.

Biographers and researchers often do not have the benefit of directly interviewing the person in question, generally because said person has been inconveniently dead for a large number of years. On the one hand, this deprives the researcher of direct knowledge and other data that can only come from first-hand information.

On the other hand, removing the subject from the research process forces the writer to look at them more objectively, at arm's length, as it were. The researcher must now piece together clues about their subject from written records, statements by contemporaries, and historical information. (Another benefit is that the subject is not there to tell lies about himself, which is why I think Mark Twain biographies have increasing accuracy as time passes.)  This provides a sense of perspective which contemporary accounts often lack.

A really good biographer must therefore be equally able to research the cold hard historical facts of his or her subject, while at the same time deducing the subject's emotional state and possible motivations, based on the tapestry created from this information. They must be able to create a viable, possible world for this very real character to inhabit, one that does not contradict any known facts.

I believe this is why Theodore Roosevelt confuses and annoys researchers. No one can believe that a man could live a life so incredibly large while and at the same time being so... simple.

Not simple in the Forrest Gump sense, of course; not even close. Theodore Roosevelt attended Harvard back when a Harvard degree actually meant something, studying two foreign languages, biology, politics, history, and law, and got top marks in all of them, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

But simple in the sense that, by all accounts, here was a man who wore his motivations on his sleeve at all times, was painfully honest, and stuck to his guns in almost every situation. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of Roosevelt's closest friends, famously said of him, “You must always remember that the President is about six.”

He was also possessed of a colossal ego and a sense of class awareness and entitlement that bordered on snobbery at times.

Any biographer that is going to take on Roosevelt, therefore, must be ready not only to take things at face value, but also to realize that “face value” can be a relative term.

It also helps for the researcher to be a crackerjack writer, and Edmund Morris is certainly up to the task. He has broken down the life of Roosevelt into three volumes. The third, detailing Roosevelt's life post-presidency, has yet to be published. The second, Theodore Rex, accounts for Roosevelt's tenure in the White House, from the time of William McKinley's assassination until the inauguration of William Taft.

The first book in the series, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, is an enthralling account of how Roosevelt the man grew out of Roosevelt the boy.

If we remember anything about Roosevelt at all from what we were taught in school, it is usually a simple watered-down story of how the small child, pale and sickly with asthma and other unnamed illnesses, moved out west to the Badlands of the Dakota Territory and became a healthy, powerful man by exercising and lifting weights, a sort of nineteenth-century Charles Atlas. Some people might even be able to tell you that he was in the Army and did something at San Juan Hill, although they probably couldn't tell you which war it was, or why. (It was the Spanish-American War. The US beat Spain, and, in so doing, ended about five hundred years of Spanish colonialism and pretty much finished them as a world power. You might recall that it was Spain, not England, that “discovered” the Americas, so it was kind of a big deal, is the point I'm making here.)

The real story of Roosevelt has the facts straight. To detail this amazing man's life in a short review would not be possible, and, fortunately, I don't have to; all I have to do is convince you that this book is worth reading.

And it is. Morris shows a depth of feeling for Roosevelt that is apparent on every page, without falling into the chasm of hero-worship or the penchant for character assassination that seems to plague second-rate works. When Roosevelt is an obnoxious child or a pretentious fop of a university student, as he could be at times, Morris takes us there with disarming (and often amusing) honesty. When Roosevelt pines for the first love of his life, his first wife Alice, and then experiences the agony as she dies of Bright's Disease at a very young age, we feel it as well. When Roosevelt announces his intention to form a brigade with Leonard Wood to fight in the war, we understand his motivations as well as anyone might.

This book won a Pulitzer in 1979, and it's easy to see why. It is imaginatively written, scrupulously researched, and, most important of all, a real pleasure to read. It not only brings Theodore Roosevelt to life in a fascinating and compelling way; it provides an excellent motivational and emotional backdrop for the events that occur in Theodore Rex. As an avid reader of biographies, I can recommend this book very highly indeed.