Brooklyn native’s book on Roosevelt, Taft offers lessons, wild tales
Brooklyn BookBeat
In her beautiful new account of the lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Brooklyn native, spins a tale so gripping that one questions the need for fiction when real life is so plump with drama and intrigue.
“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” (Simon & Schuster) takes readers from cradle to grave of these men who led the nation during a pivotal time. Poignant details of their childhoods and courtships combine with painstaking explanations of the legislative battles they fought that helped shape the future of the country.
The former presidents are thoroughly humanized with accounts like these: Taft won over his future wife in part by offering to cut the meat for her younger sister at a picnic. Roosevelt’s earliest memories involve having asthma attacks and being unable to sleep except in the arms of his father, who would carry “the gasping child from room to room.”