Theodore Rex

Random House Inc. Fine in Very Good Dust Jacket. 2001. Hard Cover. 772 pages: 5.75 x 8.75 in.: 2.6: Book Club Edition (BCE): KB#005709: Dustjacket now protected by a new Brodart Mylar Cover. Boards and pages are clean, unmarked, brightly colored, tightly bound and sharp cornered. Scarce, Out Of Print, Book. Dustjacket has some small, well-repaired by archival tape, cuts along bottom edge. Believe book is a BCE, due to smaller size and no price on dustjacket, even though Copyright Page states First Edition, with a correct number line for Random House, beginning with a 2. "It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years ago. A detailed prologue describes TR's assumption of power and journey to Washington, with the assassinated President McKinley riding behind him like a ghost of the nineteenth century. (Trains rumble throughout this irresistibly moving narrative, as TR crosses and recrosses the nation. ) Traveling south through a succession of haunting landscapes, TR encounters harbingers of all the major issues of the new century-Imperialism, Industrialism, Conservation, Immigration, Labor, Race-plus the overall challenge that intimidated McKinley: how to harness America's new power as the world's richest nation. Theodore Rex (the title is taken from a quip by Henry James) tells the story of the following seven and a half years-years in which TR entertains, infuriates, amuses, strong-arms, and seduces the body politic into a state of almost total subservience to his will. It is not always a pretty story: one of the revelations here is that TR was hated and feared by a substantial minority of his fellow citizens. Wall Street, the white South, Western lumber barons, even his own Republican leadership in Congress strive to harness his steadily increasing power. " .