Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

(Random House, 784 pages, $35)

Theodore Roosevelt makes most ex-presidents look like slackers, said Jonathan E. Lazarus in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. In the third and final volume of Edmund Morris’ landmark biography, we join a 50-year-old TR as he sets off on a “massive” African safari. The immensely popular ex-politician is just three weeks out of the Oval Office and about to bag large animal carcasses by the score. He will soon embark on a victory lap through Europe, during which he’ll dine with kings and scoop up a Nobel Peace Prize. Within just 10 years, he’ll be dead. But first must come a split with his successor, a third-party comeback attempt, a bullet to the ribs, eight books, and a world war. Good thing we have “a wordsmith of velvety talent” to stitch it all together.

Morris is a terrific dramatist, but he’s no historian, said Kathleen Dalton in The Wall Street Journal. Readers devouring this entertaining volume would never guess that the running theme of Roosevelt’s final decade was his advocacy of far more progressive policies than he’d pushed while in power. Morris “grudgingly” concedes that his hero ran well to the left of the incumbent William Taft in 1912. But he willfully obscures the fact that the former Republican standard-bearer held fast to the Bull Moose Party’s platform “until the day he died.” Morris, who was once handpicked to be Ronald Reagan’s biographer, so wants TR to “die Tory” that in this book “he does.”

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But late in life, Roosevelt even surrendered his gung-ho view of war, said Michael Kazin in TheDailyBeast.com. As a Rough Rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt became so enamored of combat’s effect on men’s spirit that, even after two terms in the White House, he preferred to be addressed as “Colonel Roosevelt” rather than “Mr. President.” But his enthusiasm for war drained away during World War I, when his youngest son was shot down over France. TR “fell into inconsolable grief,” and Morris captures that paternal breakdown brilliantly. Whatever the shortcomings of his books as history, their “literary splendor” ensures they will be read for generations.