I finished Colonel Roosevelt two and a half weeks after I started, partly because it’s five hundred seventy pages of solidly-written biography, and party because I put it on pause to read three other books. It’s not that the subject was uninteresting (perish the thought!) or the writing was poor (never!), it was me. I get distracted easily. Oooooo, shiny!

I had to read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars because My Darling B put it on hold for me at the library, which I thought would work out just fine. It was a new book and I was way down on the list, so I thought i had plenty of time. I was about a hundred fifty pages into Colonel Roosevelt when it came in. Should’ve known that would happen.

And Griftopia was just sitting there on the coffee table one day and I have such a good time reading Matt Taibbi. I don’t think anybody could fault me for taking a weekend off to read that. The third book was Berlin, a graphic novel that I didn’t finish because it sucked; I read three chapters until I couldn’t motivate myself to pick it up off the bedstand any more and threw myself back into reading Colonel Roosevelt.

My Darling B bought a copy of this last book in Edmund Morris’s three-volume biography of one of the largest personalities that America will ever know after she heard me going gaga over the news that it had just been published. I heard the author on NPR in the wee small hours while making the morning pot of mud and otherwise trying to make myself ready to face another day in cubicle hell (if there was a god, it would not tolerate the existence of office cubicles), and even though I was still swamped in the morning’s miasma I couldn’t help babble about it. A little later in the week we saw Morris on The Daily Show, telling Jon Stewart how Roosevelt learned the most heartbreaking lesson of war when his son Archie was killed in a dogfight over Europe. I put the book on reserve the next time we went to the library. I was number three hundred-something, even though they hadn’t bought a copy yet.

Both Timber and I read the first two volumes of the biography and have passed many an evening at the dining room table debating who was a badder badass, TR or Chuck Norris; TR or John Wayne; TR or zombies. TR always wins. For Christmas I stuffing his stocking with a t-shirt with Teddy’s face on it, cropped down to the pince-nez and teeth that made him so recognizable (the post office famously delivered a letter that was addressed with nothing more than a line sketch of those almond-eyed spectacles over a picket-fence set of choppers.) He’s going to like this last volume as much as I did, when he gets the chance to read it. He’s got as much on his TBR list as I do.

But he’ll read it. I’ll make sure he does. Not that I’ll have to twist his arm much.

Colonel Roosevelt begins with Teddy’s year-long African safari, right after he left office, where he shot something like a million animals, in round numbers. After you kill a couple thousand, you can round up to a million. He loved nature, but he also loved blowing it away. He didn’t seem to have any problem with the conflict that was apparent there. Quite a lot of his life was like that.

He went on a grand tour of Europe after the safari, then went home to find his good friend, Taft, had made a mess of his presidency, so he ran against Taft in the next election and they got into a nearly life-long Adams-Jefferson estrangement that didn’t get patched up until almost the day before Roosevelt died. Besides alienating Taft, he ran as a Progressive party candidate and split the Republican vote, ironically becoming just as responsible for getting Wilson into office as Taft was, although he would hardly admit that to himself or anyone else.

Then, in his mid-fifties he went on an expedition through South America, charting an unknown river and nearly getting eaten alive by sepsis and malaria. He came back just in time to agitate for getting the US into the war. He loved war almost as much as he loved shooting big game, for much the same reasons. When the US finally got into war, all he wanted was to raise a division of cavalry and die gloriously in battle, as if that sort of thing was still done. Wilson wouldn’t hear of it, so he used what influence he still had to make sure his sons all got in and sent to the front lines as quickly as possible. It was so important for him to get into the fight, even vicariously, but he didn’t know how hard losing a son would hit him until it happened. And that was perhaps the greatest life-changing event he had since he was a sickly child.

All by itself, this is a really very amazing book. You wouldn’t have to read the first two volumes to get a feeling for many of the complex facets of Roosevelt’s personality, although it would certainly help. But all by itself, there’s quite a story here, and many chapters that are all but impossible to put down.