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Two earlier Corners took up the question of biography and the Christian historian, with the focus on contrasting interpretations of the life of Theodore Roosevelt. A massive new biography suggests it's time to revisit the subject, with a twist.

"You're obviously right that the several topics I take up in the paper have been dealt with elsewhere," I wrote to a critic of an article I had submitted to a scholarly journal for publication. "The point of the piece was to bring that material together in a single place. To the extent that readers may not be inclined to look up small details in 60 or more secondary sources, I thought that it would be useful to present the scattered literature in a single paper. To my knowledge, no such paper exists, and it seems to me that synthesis has its value. In this way, the paper does something 'new.'"

As of this writing, whether that embattled article will survive remains an open question, but the "problem" that put its future in the balance is well known to graduate students and harried college professors: publish something "new" or perish—or, even worse, find yourself cast into the outer darkness inhabited by mere teachers, writers, and (most ghoulish) popularizers, a la Stephen Ambrose.

These thoughts came to me while reading Princeton University historian Christine Stansell's acidic review, published in the New Republic (Dec. 10, 2001), of Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris's best-selling sequel to his universally acclaimed biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Insofar as academic bile can be measured (gallons? oceans?), Stansell's piece is more subdued than a similar one by her colleague Sean Wilentz, who some months earlier, also in the New Republic, went out of his way to stick two full thumbs in the eyes of David McCullough for his supposedly ridiculous (and best-selling) biography of John Adams. But that's not to say that Stansell didn't end up with some gore on her own digits.

"[A] self-respecting reader will find it impossible to slog through the mass of detail that substitutes, in [Morris's] method, for historical comprehension," Stansell writes. Morris's text is "an account that is devoid of ideas, empty of analysis, and ignorant of social context." Theodore Rex is "public television on the page." Didn't get message? "It is entertainment with endnotes." Still not getting it? "Morris works to mesmerize his readers, or more precisely to pander to them, with a tiresome and profoundly anti-intellectual you-are-thereness." And so on—and on. And on!

As it happens, Stansell is right about most of this. Of course, one would think a person of her standing sufficiently bright not to make foolish generalizations about "any self-respecting reader," since she has no way of knowing much about the likes and interests of millions of American book buyers. (Speak for yourself, ma'am.) But she's right that Theodore Rex is TV on the page, the bookish equivalent of USA Today: it's narrative composed of snippets that can be read on the exercise bike at the gym. And, yes, while it's a bit much for Stansell to claim that the book is "devoid" of ideas, she's right: Morris is a wordsmith with few equals, but he's no big thinker.

So the point is made: as academics understand the concept, Theodore Rex isn't real history: it doesn't bring much "new" to the proverbial table and, for the most part, it doesn't try to sort out answers to enduring questions about Roosevelt's presidency. Morris is a historian mainly in the sense that he writes about things that happened in the past; but he isn't interested in analyzing the past in a detailed way or in asking hefty questions about how the past got us to where we are now. Morris is, first and foremost, a writer. One doubts that he intended to write a definitive biography; his first object was to write a good book. And while Theodore Rex doesn't match up—what could?—to Morris's Pulitzer Prize- and American Book Award-winning work of some two decades ago, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, it is still an informative and wonderfully engaging book.

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46