The Bully Pulpit: A Jolly Good Book!

-
Doris Kearns Goodwin writes big books. I have an intimidating pair of them. Her 2005 book about Lincoln, Team of Rivals, stretches 917 pages, 121 of those pages are notes. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, a "brief" 892 pages, has but 96 pages of notes. I worked my way through The Bully Pulpit first. Intending to sound like one of the work's principal subjects, Theodore Roosevelt, it was "a jolly good read!"
In The Bully Pulpit, Kearns Goodwin paints vivid, attractive portrayals of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft through their lives as young men, colleagues and friends, president and cabinet-member, fierce adversaries, and reconciled old friends. Alongside these principal characters, we meet their wives, their families, and the journalists who covered them.

We meet Archibald Butt, who loved and served both presidents as a military aide and confidant. Kearns Goodwin tells of his death in a manner that thoroughly surprised me, even though I studied the historical event which captivated me as a child.

We encounter Jacob Riis, whose life deserves greater recognition. (I recommend heartily this book.) Kearns Goodwin makes S.S. McClure come alive in full dimension. We encounter Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, Lincoln Stephens, Upton Sinclair, and Kansas' William Allen White.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Credit: LBJ Foundation)
The Bully Pulpit, while intimidating in size, is elegantly written. Perhaps the book incarnates the Roosevelt adage: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." The stories, well-told, are magnificent. Take your time; this book is worth it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Más sabe el diablo. . .

-
Image
It's a phrase of Mexican origin, I'm told:  " Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ." It translates to "The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil." Often, proverbs in our native tongue do not surprise us as they are so common. We may not think twice about an expression like "The apple does not fall far from the tree," but its use in another language requires an explanation of what the phrase implies. Because a phrase is well-known to us, it may not captures us quite the way that one from a second language might. Sometimes expressions are so particular that they only can be understood in a particular context. [Another wonderful Mexican phrase, " No me cae el veinte ," refers to a 20 peso coin getting stuck in a pay phone. The adage is a means of expressing that the speaker does not understand a concept that the other has shared-- just as the coin is stuck in the payphone and one cannot yet proceed with ...
Read more

The Marvels of Murdoch Mysteries: Characters, History, Science, and Faith

-
Image
I do not watch much television. I have a few favorites like The Daily Show. I watch news. I am not heavily invested in television series. Nonetheless, I love Murdoch Mysteries . I got into it when I spent some time in Canada last year. Subsequently, Mom DVRs it each week on the local PBS station, and we have watched other seasons borrowed from the public library. Murdoch Mysteries is a Canadian television drama series aired on both City and CBC Television, titled The Artful Detective on the Ovation cable TV network, featuring Yannick Bisson as Detective William Murdoch, a police detective working in Toronto, Ontario, around the turn of the twentieth century. Murdoch Mysteries was initially adapted for television from Maureen Jennings ’s popular Detective Murdoch series of novels as three made-for-TV films broadcast in Canada in 2004 and 2005. The series first premiered in Canada in January 2008. Detective Murdoch is conspicuously Catholic. As he arrives at the scene of each hom...
Read more

Time for "Just Mercy"

-
Image
Alongside Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and john a. powell's Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society , another extraordinary book on race and the criminal justice system is Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. A public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor and the incarcerated, especially the condemned, Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative , an Alabama-based group that has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. In an historic win for EJI, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Florida , 2010 , that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are uncon...
Read more