Books: Rough Riding from Black Care

THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan;886 pages; $15.95

For almost half a century, the face on Mount Rushmore has been perceived as a full-scale model. Textbooks are unable to contain the man who was a civil war unto himself: Eastern aristocrat and Western cowpuncher, intellectual and pugilist, reformer and clubhouse Republican, imperialist and trustbuster, warrior and peacemaker.

Theodore Roosevelt is one of those figures who cannot be fully calibrated without the distance of history and the views of an outsider. This towering biography is the first to answer both...

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