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 deat...