In this account of Beethoven’s life, Morris’s “narrative is vivid, starting with the starkly black-and-white cityscape of Bonn, where Beethoven was born in 1770, then going on to the composer’s painful childhood his emergence in his teenage years as an eruptive ‘young Caliban’ his sexual shyness his triumphs as a young man in Vienna his deafness and finally his fall from sometimes charming eccentricity into ugly paranoia and perhaps even psychosis,” our reviewer wrote. In her critical appraisal, Michiko Kakutani called the book “bizarre, irresponsible and monstrously self-absorbed,” while Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised it in his review, writing, “I can think of few conventional political biographies that bring their subjects’ pasts so richly alive.” The approach was Morris’s solution to the impregnable character of Reagan, whom Morris once called “the most mysterious man I have ever confronted.” Read considerations of the book by Maureen Dowd, Steven R. This is Morris’s most divisive work - a biography of Reagan in which Morris invented characters who offer perspective on the former president. Morris “has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments,” our reviewer wrote, adding: “And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.” Morris ended his trilogy with the last 10 years of Roosevelt’s life, including his travels through Africa after leaving office. Unlike many of his peers, Morris “writes with a breezy verve that makes the pages fly, and that perfectly suits his subject,” our reviewer wrote.
The second installment in Morris’s Roosevelt trilogy begins at the moment of William McKinley’s assassination and covers Roosevelt’s seven and a half years in the White House. Morris keeps his distances and submerges his picture of Roosevelt in carefully documented fact, his portrait remains alive and believable, and never deteriorates into mere thesis.” “We get to see the many contradictory sides of Theodore Roosevelt,” our reviewer wrote. This Pulitzer Prize winner is the first of Morris’s trilogy of biographies about Roosevelt. Here are our reviews of his books, plus some of his writing for The Times.
Edmund Morris, who upended the conventions of biography when he inserted himself into his book on Ronald Reagan, died on Friday.
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