We should be thankful that Morris has found a way to be unique because “Colonel Roosevelt,’’ which surveys Roosevelt’s life from 1909, when he left the presidency, to his death in 1919, stands as another outstanding biography. Like all Morris’s books, it mixes his imaginative style with careful research and countless details. These details don’t flesh out characters or fill in context so much as they create scenes. In fact, Morris writes books that read like movies.
This comes through in the opening scene of “Colonel Roosevelt,’’ which finds Roosevelt on an African safari. Morris’s eye moves, camera-like, from the diary bulging in Roosevelt’s pocket to the gun case stenciled with his name to the African landscape — all in heart-pounding present-tense. It’s nothing short of cinematic. There’s even a montage of moments from Roosevelt’s earlier life.
Morris settles in to tell the story of Roosevelt’s final, action-packed decade. After finishing his safari and a tour of Europe, Roosevelt returned to the United States. New York welcomed him with the largest parade in its history — people paid to sit on three-story scaffolds lining the city’s streets — but Roosevelt soon turned to serious matters. William Howard Taft was struggling. The Democratic Party was reviving. And so Roosevelt, still as ambitious as ever, agreed to run for president in 1912.
Taft beat Roosevelt in the Republican primary — at this point, only six states held a direct vote — but Roosevelt became the nominee for the new Progressive Party. The Progressive convention offers Morris one of his many thrilling scenes, with its delegates in red bandanas, making “imitation moose calls.’’ But the election ends on a subdued note: Roosevelt beat Taft, but not Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson and World War I dominate the second half of the book.
