Reading Recommendations: Colonel Roosevelt, Edmund L. Morris Of all our great Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain "Colonel Roosevelt", he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. "If I see another King, I think I shall bite him."Had TR won his historic "Bull Moose" campaign in 1912 (When he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War 1, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been elected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassins bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his journey into the "Pleistoncene", a year long safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life (all of which is detailed in the book).Then follows an account of TR's reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR's literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913-1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs and his eager embrace of other cultures. As Colonel Roosevelt himself remarked, "I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I knew".Morris shows how pathologically TR turned on those who inherited the power he craved. Yet even Woodrow Wilson had to admit behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. This makes the story of TR's last years, when the "boy" in him died, all the sadder in the telling, the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.And, The Jaguar, A Charlie Hood Novel, T. Jefferson Parker.Erin McKenna, a beautiful song writer married to a crooked Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy, is kidnapped by Benjamin Armenta, the ruthless leader of the powerful Gulf Cartel. But his demands are as unusual as the crumbling castle in which Erin is kept. She is ordered to compose a unique narcocorrido, a folk ballat that records the exploits of the drug dealers, gunrunners, and outlaws who have populated Mexican history for generations. Under the threat of death, Armenta orders Erin to tell his life story, in music, and write "the greatest narcocorrido" of all time. As the mesmerizing music and lyrics of Erin's song cascade from the jungle hideout, they serve as a siren song to the two men who love her: her outlaw husband, Bradley Jones, and the and the lawman, Charlie Hood, who together lave the power to rescue her. Here, amid the ancient beauty of the Yucatecan lowlands, the long simmering rivalry between these two men will be brought closer to its explosive finale.And, The German Texans, Glen E. Lich The German Texans is a scrapbook of favorite personal clippings from the past, a collection of lives, events, pictures and memories. It is also a view of Texas history through the eyes of some of the most thoughtful and observant members of this ethnic group.This book attempts to introduce as many aspects of the German-Texan heritage as possible in a small volume conceived for a general readership. The chapters go from troubled Germany in the early 1800s to the often difficult assimilation of the German immigrants into mainstream American political and economic life.Another of the Precious Books from the Texas Bookshelves.See you at Rylander