Where To Buy Mornings on Horseback

Sometimes a project just goes wrong. DM seems to have drowned in the vast unpublished archive of Roosevelt diaries and letters he was so proud to be given access to. He needed another two years, and another draft, I fear, to digest it all. He has made TR boring-- an amazing feat. If there's a letter, DM quotes it all, mercilessly. If not, the event never happened, and everything about TR's youth that fascinates us somehow eluded letters and diaries! Or did DM think we needed a full picture of TR as a silly young Harvard snob to correct our heroic image of him? He quotes nearly in full a letter TR writes from Harvard about how he can't get the rug in his room to lie down. Yet-- here I got angry-- an entire TR buffalo hunt is merely mentioned in an aside. It lacked a letter to quote. That's DM's research problem. TR's lovesick honeymoon gushes exist, all of them, but they shouldn't be hung around his neck for us to read. Whose letters to his fiancee wouldn't make him look silly, in print? As for the "extraordinary" family, must we read his grown, drunken brother's babytalk letters to his Mom, "My own dear sweet Motherling! if she feels cold at night, she wraps a blanket around me, so that I wake up roasting." There's more about TR's old maidish sisters than about TR, full accounts quoted about his mother's old age neat freak habits, after TR was married. The one success is the full portrait of TR"s father, a "Christian gentleman" if there ever was one, and one of the kindest fathers to a difficult child who ever lived. With one more draft and massive cuts DM could have produced a splendid short bio on TR's father. As is, "mornings on horseback" is almost a deceitful title, inviting us to think we'll see Teddy out west. Instead, since he kept a diary, his life as a NY State assemblyman up in Albany during an unimportant era is described in boring detail. There's no balance. Whatever was in that archive, went in the book, and it's a weird picture of TR as a result. Strictly for buffs who can mentally adjust it.Get more detail about Mornings on Horseback.