Bookshelf: New books on Teddy Roosevelt, in the wilderness and at war

How do you like your Teddy Roosevelt — sliced and diced, or the whole megillah? If big books about America’s larger-than-life 26th president are your thing, there are plenty of door-stopping bios to suit your fancy. But Roosevelt’s multifarious life — he was by turns a politician, writer, hunter, soldier, explorer and amateur scientist — is suitable for a thematic close-up, as displayed in the books under review here.

Darrin Lunde’s “The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, A Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History” (Crown, 334 pp., $28) shows how an “asthmatic city slicker” became a driving force in the study of American wildlife and species preservation. Lunde is a mammal specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the book’s somewhat narrow approach reflects the biases of a museum curator. There is very little here on Roosevelt’s broader — and pioneering — environmental activism, which led to the creation of dozens of national parks and wildlife refuges during his presidency. (For a full blown treatment of that subject, see Douglas Brinkley’s 2009 “The Wilderness Warrior.”)

Still, Lunde’s book offers a compact introduction to Roosevelt’s love of the natural world, which vied with politics as his chief passion. As a sickly boy from a well-to-do family, young TR zealously shot, stuffed and collected birds (Lunde doesn’t stint on the grisly taxidermic details). Roosevelt’s father was a leader in the formation of the American Museum of Natural History, and the young TR donated his specimens to the institution. Roosevelt hiked in the Adirondacks and the north woods of Maine, making notes and collating his finds. He was a fine writer with a gift for describing animal behavior.

Lunde’s own writing is clear and well-paced as he describes Roosevelt’s adventures east and out west, where he went in search of big game such as elk, mountain lion and grizzly bear, as well as his encounters with the naturalists who shaped his thinking.

If Roosevelt had a lust for he-man stuff, his pursuit was also deeply scientific. He combined the role of the hunter with that of naturalist. He shot animals to preserve and study them. To the modern reader, this is perplexing, but Lunde explains how hunting, which took TR into the field and the world of actual (not theoretical) nature, was an essential component of “museum naturalism.” Death was a fact of the natural world; life had to be taken to further the ends of studying life.

“Born in the world of natural-history museums, tempered on wilderness hunting expeditions . . . Roosevelt never apologized for his honest way of seeing nature,” Lunde writes. “We today have his love of nature to thank for the laws promoting the fair chase of game animals; the land set aside as national parks, wildlife reserves, and bird sanctuaries; and even many individual specimens in our most important natural-history museums.”

Roosevelt himself never apologized for his love of martial values. He was a peacemaker who won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, but also an imperialist who fought in one of America’s most dubious conflicts, the Spanish-American War of 1898. What Secretary of State John Hay called a “splendid little war” (it lasted barely four months) was furiously opposed by the likes of Mark Twain and William James. But it worked out splendidly for Roosevelt, who won renown for his exploits with the Rough Riders, a volunteer cavalry unit.

Mark Lee Gardner deals only in passing with the politics of the war in “Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment, and the Immortal Charge Up San Juan Hill” (William Morrow, 336 pp., $26.99). His account is more of an action movie, and a pretty good one, too. If the Rough Riders have often been reduced to just Roosevelt against the Spanish in Cuba, Gardner provides a full look at the outfit, which was disbanded after the campaign. “They were miners, lawyers, stenographers, actors, printers, carpenters, saddlemakers, electricians, barbers, jewelers, bakers, railroad workers, schoolteachers, painters, and, to be sure, cowboys,” he writes. Upper-class swells, so-called “millionaire recruits,” mixed with Indians from the Oklahoma Territory. It was a diverse unit, to say the least.

The Rough Riders won glory, but, as Gardner shows, it wasn’t a smooth path to legend. The unit was beset by the usual logistical problems of war. Gardner’s account of the famous charge up San Juan Hill pulses with the kinetic confusion of men under fire. Spanish Mausers took a toll against American troops in Cuba; but the tropical climate and disease — yellow fever, malaria, typhus — were the real enemies.

Roosevelt was popular with his men; he could mix with anyone. Political opponents questioned his leadership, but Gardner ably defends Roosevelt’s accomplishments on the battlefield. Whether in war or in the wilderness, TR pursued the strenuous life with gusto.