MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

Author: DAVID MCCULLOUGH
Publisher: POCKETBOOKS
Publication Date: 2003-07-01
Features: Mornings on Horseback is the authoritative biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Written by David McCullough, the author of presidential biographies Truman and John Adams, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. His father was the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. His mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, was a Southerner and a celebrated beauty but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There were sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. And while Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and Senator Roscoe Conkling play a part, it is the diverse and deeply human Roosevelt family, all brought vividly to life, which gives this book its remarkable power. Mornings on Horseback spans seventeen years from 1869 when little "Teedie" was ten to 1886 when, as a hardened "real life cowboy," he returns from the West to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin anew as a grown man, whole in body and spirit. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about "blessed" mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands. It is a once captivating story, a brilliant social history, and a work of important scholarship that does away with several old myths and breaks new ground.