Long Books

May 20, 2016May 19, 2016 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The Ultimate Long Book

I’ve seen a number of posts lately about the trend toward long books. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books are credited with stimulating these trends. It’s interesting that all the long book lists are fiction. I suspect that part of the attraction is the chance to lose oneself in a really good story that you don’t want to end. I personally found myself wishing that Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See was at least several hundred pages longer. I’ve reveled in Lord of the Rings several time and thoroughly enjoyed Sharon Kay Penman’s fiction. I have a couple Hilary Mantel books on my TBR stack on the recommendations of friends.

Goodreads has a feature on its stats pages that tells you what were the longest books you’ve read each year. I got curious what books would come up. It turns out that my long books with one exception, have been history or biography and the one work of fiction explores an alternate history. I’ve been on Goodreads since 2011 and here are my long books for each year.

2011: Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace (880 pages). Ross details his diplomatic efforts in the Middle East during the Clinton years, when negotiators probably got as close to an Israel-Palestinian peace as they ever have, only to see Arafat walk away.

2012: Gordon W.Prange, At Dawn We Slept (889 pages). This is Prange’s monumental work on Pearl Harbor at the beginning of World War II.

2013: Stephen King, 11/22/63 (842 pages). King explores how history might have diffent if Kennedy had survived the attempt on his life.

2014: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (920 pages). The first of three volumes, covering Roosevelt’s early life until the day he learns of McKinley’s death and that he is President.

2015: Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit (910 pages). More Roosevelt! Goodwin, looks at the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies. Two big men, one long book.

2016 (so far): Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee Lieutenants (910 pages). This was the abridged version of Freeman’s study of Lee’s commanders.

King’s ability to spin a tale is well established. But what many haven’t discovered, remembering high school history classes, are that many who write history are a pleasure to read. This was certainly true of the books by Ross, Morris, Goodwin and Freeman. I hope you discover them, along with writers like Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, Winston Churchill (who wrote history as well as made it), David Halberstam (who also wrote some good baseball books–a kind of history), and Arthur Schlesinger.

So if you are looking for something different in a long book, try some history or biography!

Review: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

October 13, 2014October 13, 2014 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One has to be an awfully bad writer to pen an uninteresting biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Edmund Morris has written a wonderful account in this volume of Roosevelt’s life until the day he became President. Even Roosevelt’s earliest years are interesting as we read about the sickly, asthmatic young boy who creates natural history museums and responds to his father’s challenge (you have the brains but not the body) by beginning a program of weight-lifting and exercise and by relentlessly pushing himself physically. Then, after abandoning his childhood love Edith, he courts and marries Alice Lee.

What follows is a whirlwind experience of becoming a young assemblyman ferocious to change the world, launching a cattle ranching venture in the west, and losing Alice at the birth of his first child. To console himself, he goes back west and loses himself in the ranch, complete with a winter-time pursuit of some outlaws who he apprehends and brings to justice.

We see all the elements of his life begin to coalesce. He returns to New York, he marries Edith, the childhood sweetheart, and makes an unsuccessful run for mayor. He begins a writing career that includes a landmark history of the U.S. Navy in the War of 1812, a number of biographies and a multi-volume history of the settlement of the west. He serves stints as a Civil Service administrator under Grover Cleveland, a New York City police commissioner (replete with stories of early morning prowls catching police off their beats!) and Under-Secretary of the Navy under McKinley.

This in turn leads to his “crowded hour” on San Juan Hill. His was among the voices protesting Spanish imperialism and oppression in Cuba. When the Maine incident gives the country its reason to go to war, he left his position to become a Lieutenant Colonel of New York volunteers and discovers himself a leader of men. Positioned opposite the key position to defeating the Spanish, he leads a charge up two hills and takes the decisive position with his “Rough Riders”.

The story captures the imagination of the country and he returns a hero. Of course this leads to another book, one of his best sellers, the Governor’s office in New York, and after a couple years to a Vice Presidential nomination, when McKinley’s Vice President dies. This volume concludes with the assassination of McKinley, and the telegram delivered to Roosevelt in the Adirondacks that informs him he is now the President of the United States.

Morris draws this life with rich detail, creating a portrait of the man and a coherent narrative of the events. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this work and I can see why. He combines extensive research with a riveting narrative that explores the inner drives that made Roosevelt who he was. His biography of Roosevelt has two further volumes, one of Roosevelt’s life as President, and one of his years after the Presidency. Both await on my reading stack and I eagerly look forward to them.

View all my reviews

Mr. President

October 7, 2014 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

I am in the midst of reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and thoroughly enjoying it! My hunch is that you have to be a terrible writer to write a boring biography of Teddy Roosevelt. He was interesting from childhood! This is the first of a three volume effort by Morris and I am delighted to say that the other two are waiting on my “to be read” stack!

It seems that this is a wonderful time if you are a lover of presidential biographies. Of course, we had the recent PBS series on the Roosevelts (it is really just a happy coincidence that the Morris biographies came to the top of the stack at this time!). It also happens that Doris Kearns Goodwin has written on Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in The Bully Pulpit, a book I received for Christmas that comes next after the Morris bios. I happen to love everything Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about from her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers to Abraham Lincoln in Team of Rivals. For those fascinated by all things Roosevelt, she also wrote about FDR and Eleanor in an earlier book, No Ordinary Time.

Moving beyond the Roosevelts, there are a host of wonderful biographies that have appeared in the last ten years or so. First to come to mind are David McCullough’s biographies of Truman and John Adams. I happen to think the biography of Truman is the better of the two in exploring the character of this president who emerged from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, even though Adams probably had the more interesting life. Not too long ago I read and reviewed Harlow Giles Unger’s John Quincy Adams. John Quincy struggled in the shadow of his father but was a child prodigy, an ambassador in six countries, was a one-term president like his father, went on to congress, and argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court. He died in the House. He was probably one of our most distinguished ex-Presidents. I’ve read several biographies of Thomas Jefferson but still think the best was Dumas Malone’s six volume study of Jefferson and His Time.

I could go on and on but perhaps the interesting question I ask myself is “why the fascination with presidential biographies?” At least for me I don’t think there is a single reason. One is a certain interest in leadership and how it may be exercised both well and badly. We certainly have examples of both in our presidential history! Another is that American presidential biographies are really American history with skin on it! I’ve read both extensively but to understand both the influences and limits presidents faced in trying to shape events is instructive. It took even a Lincoln three years to find a general in Grant who would fight, and it also took a Lincoln to hold the North to its task in the absence of a Grant.

Perhaps I read these, even as I read history more generally to understand how we get here. The actions of Presidents past have shaped the Presidency now. Sometimes, I think there is a bit of a longing as well that we might find one like one of the “great” presidents of the past to fill the office. Reading the bios and the history, it seems that somehow, the greatest of presidents occupied the office at the most perilous junctures in our history. Is it that ordinary people rise to extraordinary heights in such times? Or is it a kind of divine providence that we might pray for as the need faces us? One thing is clear is that there have also been mediocrities in the office and if we are praying people, we can pray to be delivered of such folk, particularly in perilous times.

What are your favorite presidential biographies? And why do you like reading them?