Also, on page 126:
His “beach book” for the season was Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History, in ten volumes. Unfazed, he read it straight through, along with his usual supply of dime novels and periodicals.
You can put those 10 volumes in your Kindle for $2.99. Over 4,000 pages.
There's also this in the first volume of Morris's trilogy about TR, describing the extent of his reading:
As quietness settles down over the Presidential apartments, Roosevelt and his wife will sit by the fire in the Prince of Wales Room and read to each other. At about ten o’clock the First Lady will rise and kiss her husband good night. He will continue to read in the light of a student lamp, peering through his one good eye (the other is almost blind) at the book held inches from his nose, flicking over the pages at a rate of two or three a minute. This is the time of the day he loves best.
“Reading with me is a disease.” He succumbs to it so totally... that he cannot hear his own name being spoken. Nothing short of a thump on the back will regain his attention. Asked to summarize the book he has been leafing through with such apparent haste, he will do so in minute detail, often quoting the actual text. The President manages to get through at least one book a day even when he is busy. Owen Wister has lent him a book shortly before a full evening’s entertainment at the White House, and been astonished to hear a complete review of it over breakfast. “Somewhere between six one evening and eight-thirty next morning, beside his dressing and his dinner and his guests and his sleep, he had read a volume of three-hundred-and-odd pages, and missed nothing of significance that it contained.”
On evenings like this, when he has no official entertaining to do, Roosevelt will read two or three books entire. His appetite for titles is omnivorous and insatiable, ranging from the Histories of Thucydides to the Tales of Uncle Remus. Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy. In [1906] alone, Roosevelt has devoured all the novels of Trollope, the complete works of De Quincey, a Life of Saint Patrick, the prose works of Milton and Tacitus (“until I could stand them no longer”), Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, the seafaring yarns of Jacobs, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, a German novel called Jörn Uhl, “a most satisfactorily lurid Man-eating Lion story,” and Foulke’s Life of Oliver P. Morton, not to mention at least five hundred other volumes, on subjects ranging from tropical flora to Italian naval history.
ADDED: I wanted to show you this wonderful Thomas Nast cartoon from 1874, which I found looking up who was Oliver P. Morton:
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33 comments:
Lacking modern day cellular phones, Teddy Roosevelt kept a book on his desk to avoid boring people.
I read the Edmond Morris books on Teddy. He was extremely comprehensive in his details. I thought a good editor could have helped this project.....
A pregnant pause. Smoke... read'm if you got'm.
So: what progress?
So Teddy was also an infovore.
Another great reason to love him more.
I’m going to be equal opportunity, go out on a limb and say that it’s doubtful that our current president or his immediate predecessor have read a single book in the last 8 years.
“ At about ten o’clock the First Lady will rise and kiss her husband good night.”
…before putting up one or two more posts on her blog, checking her facebook page and flipping through TikTok one last time.
Thomas Nast was a man who knew how to treat the pols with the respect they were due. There is no room for his kind in the current legacy press, with the exception of those who target Trump and his supporters.
They think we don't notice, I guess. Imagine that.
It kind of tastes like contempt to this reader, from my location. A strange way to win hearts and minds.
Yes, I repeat myself.
an interesting exercise would be to pair tr and Roosevelt, they were both aristocrats mavericks, empire builders prolific authors, they defined large parts of each others century,
I am exhausted just reading about his reading. I think I'll grab a book and lie down on the sofa for a rest.
"I’m going to be equal opportunity, go out on a limb and say that it’s doubtful that our current president or his immediate predecessor have read a single book in the last 8 years."
Last 8 years? Probably not in their entire adult lives.
Meade, it's hard to compete with a good computer.
Interesting to note that biographies of some of our greatest past Presidents, like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln details how much they read. Even less than great Presidents such as James Buchanan were known to be very well read. They learned and studied the classic writings and thinkers. I wonder what the reading lists of our current leaders- say in the last 15-20 years- would look like. Not just the Presidents, but also the Congress Creatures, and those dark figures who make up the staffs of our cabinet leaders.
It might explain a lot.
Roosevelt was probably the most prolific author to have the white house. Along with Herbert hoover. Both are well worth t reading.
He was a best selling author in his day and mainly supported himself with his writing.
The best of his books, IMHO, art least the one I enjoyed the most was his book about his expedition up the River of Doubt (now Rio Roosevelt) in Brazil. He did this post presidency in his mid 50s and it nearly killed him. A terrific tale of adventure very well written.
I also recommend his 4 volume history "the winning of the west" it starts when the "west" still began in Virginia. Not as exciting as the other, perhaps but interesting history, written well.
For amusement read his pure propaganda advocating us entry into ww1.
I've read several bios of tr and he is one of our more interesting presidents. I'm not a big fan of his politics but he was an interacting man and even more interesting writer.
John Henry
He also had a hand in founding the prior fascist American Legion. An organization of veterans but only marginilly for veterans. From the preamble of their constitution :
To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order; to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent. Americanism; to preserve the memories and incidents of our association in the Great War; to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state, and nation; to combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses; to make right the master of might; to promote peace and good will on earth; to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom, and democracy; to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.
John Henry
Thank God Nast didn't draw Hamas terrorists...
In a good year I can only read a tenth of that and without anywhere close to the recall attributed to TR. I guess I'm a true slacker.
No Biden problem on that score. Unless the "book" was a comic book of Archie or Denis the Menace or maybe he's start playing some Andrews/McGuire Sisters album on his record player.
Waah, John Henry. Read a book. You know what books do? They contextualize.
It is a great cartoon. TR read Anna karenia while escorting a pair of cattle thieves to the nearest county Jail while he was a ND Rancher.
Another thing about TR, is he could actually quote poetry and sections from the books he read. And he incorporated the lessons of history into his political philosphy.
Unlike George Bush who supposedly read hundreds to books without any visible affect (or is it effect?)
Levi, I’ll bet the last number of Presidents are like LeBron James. Carry a book around whose spine has never been cracked and pretend to have read it.
“"I’m going to be equal opportunity, go out on a limb and say that it’s doubtful that our current president or his immediate predecessor have read a single book in the last 8 years."
Last 8 years? Probably not in their entire adult lives.”
Unfortunately, that makes them more representative, not less, of their culture. Of the five other educated adult males in my office, not one reads books for pleasure. My boss reads science fiction occasionally. His boss reads religious books generated by his church. Many of the women read, but mostly marginal chick-lit or sci-fi/fantasy.
OTOH, they’re a remarkably fair-minded bunch. Nature’s Liberals, in the classic sense. So maybe the free-range, light-grazing, Internet style of acquiring information doesn’t create deep thinkers. But, absent indoctrination and corruption, it doesn’t create ideologues, either. Except for hysterical Facebook fascists, natch.
IIRC, Bush the Lesser and his buds Rove and/or Cheney had a history book reading competition, and didn't Obama invite a bunch of prominent historians to the White House to . . . burnish the images of everyone involved?
TR probably read (and wrote) more history than a lot of history profs; I only recall one other prez notable for appreciating history and that was Truman. Ike was forced to learn military history by his old army mentor Fox Conner, but otherwise he wasn't much interested.
TR and Churchill make an interesting pair of intellectual men of action.
I can never think of TR without thinking of Mencken's line, that the great enemy of Kaiser Bill was the foremost exponent of Kaiserism in America.
Harsh, but not entirely unfair.
Blogger Tina Trent said...
Waah, John Henry. Read a book. You know what books do? They contextualize.
I've probably averaged 2 books a week since age 10 or 12. Im 75. How many books is that?
To stay on topic, 6 of those books were written by TR and another 3 or more were about TR.
I agree about contextualizing. But I would also say that many books have at most 4-6 points to make with the rest being filler between. Often interesting filler, even useful filler, but the real core of many books could be summed up in a few pages.
Then there is the Packaging Machinery Handbook. I like to think it is an exception. Good stuff on every page. If you are looking for a Christmas gift you could do a lot worse. Don't forget the portal.
John Henry
Blogger Narr said...
Ike was forced to learn military history by his old army mentor Fox Conner, but otherwise he wasn't much interested.
I remember reading in one bio of Ike that he always carried a crate of pulp fiction novels with him and read them for relaxation.
John Henry
John H-- Ike loved Westerns.
@JohnHenry Does the Packaging Machinery Handbook come gift wrapped?
I was trying to upload a fine Jpeg I have of a 1907 magazine cover with a caricature of an anarchist being dropped off a boat by Uncle Sam but couldn't figure it out.
TR was full of life and a will to enjoy living it. I for one want to thank his mother for not aborting him.
Chuck,
Buy it directly from me and not only is it signed and discounted $20 but if you want I will gift wrap it too.
I'll even throw in a free copy of my Machinery Matters book while supplies last.
John Henry
"... marginal chick-lit ..." [emphasis added]
That implies there's another kind.
Leora,
You can't -- blogger provides absolutely zero capability for commenters to directly include images in their comments.
What you can do, if you have access to somewhere else that you can make images reachable on the web, is to do so there, and then include a link to it in your comment here.
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