T.R. aficionados already have many carefully indexed and annotated sources to turn to. Elting Morison and John M. Blum edited the eight-volume edition of T.R.'s letters, published between 1951 and '54. The best of his family correspondence can be found in Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 1870–1918
(1924), Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children
(1919, revised and retitled A Bully Father
for its 1995 reprint), and Letters to Kermit from Theodore Roosevelt, 1902–1908
(1946). Meanwhile, T.R.'s most important political correspondence is highlighted in Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918
(1925). Thus Texas A&M history professor and Roosevelt biographer Brands (T.R.: The Last Romantic), unable to add anything new in the way of previously unpublished letters, relies for value on selecting those that "illuminate Roosevelt—the man, the public figure, the polymath." T.R.'s missives to the likes of Nicholas Murray Butler and New York congressman William Chanler do indeed make interesting reading, and this collection of 1,000 letters may serve to introduce new readers to the 26th president. The book suffers greatly, however, from a lack of explanatory notes. Brief one- and two-page essays introduce the book's six sections. Brands provides only occasional one-line bios for some (not all) of T.R.'s correspondents; likewise, readers have frighteningly few annotations to give context to references within letters. Who exactly was Finley Peter Dunne, and why did T.R. write him, in 1899, in part to anxiously beg to make his acquaintance? Brands's book is full of such riddles. Brands also fails to provide precise citations as to where the original manuscripts for these letters (scattered in libraries around the world) might be found. (Oct.)
