Criticism
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
“Theodore Roosevelt, in this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, has a claim on being the most interesting man ever to be President of this country.” --Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A biography which aspires to scholarship should make a significant contribution to the understanding of the effects of character on events, as well as they way in which behavior reflects reality. Judged by such standards, Morris’s book leaves a good deal to be desired.” – Miles F. Shore, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XI:2 (Autumn 1980), 294.
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
“As you read on — and such is the force and fascination of Morris’s narrative that you can’t help reading on – you begin to see the benefits of his highly unorthodox technique, which turns out to be a conjoining of imagination and reality.... To judge from the book’s extensive notes, it in no way distorts the record of Mr. Reagan’s life, only the viewpoint from which it is told. It’s difficult to approve the technique in theory; in less skilled hands it will doubtless prove a disaster. But it certainly succeeds in this case.” – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, 30 September 1999
“Mr. Morris has produced a book that is anything but scholarly and substantial. He has produced a bizarre, monstrously self-absorbed book – a Ragtime-esque ‘memoir’ featuring a self-annotating narrator out of a Philp Roth novel and childlike hero out of Being There. Even worse, this loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction is being sold not as a novel, but as ‘the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, 2 October 1999.
“A reader who surrends to Morris’s self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagnation will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist.... Dutch never fails to evoke the power and mystery of its subject.” – Steven R. Weisman, New York Times Book Review, 10 October 1999
Theodore Rex
“As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison, and the younger Arthur Schlesinger’s volumes on Franklin Roosevelt.” --Ernest R. May, The Times Literary Supplement
“Superb . . . The new book is every bit as detailed and imaginatively written as its 1979 predecessor.... What distinguishes Theodore Rex is, if anything, not the copious research (there are 180 pages of notes) but rather its deeply novelistic construction, the numerous writerly touches, and the acts of emotional sympathy.... Add to this some beautiful smaller touches, and you end up with a biography that’s as good as fiction.” —Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine
Beethoven: the Universal Composer
“Since Morris is famous only for his lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, his profound knowledge of Beethoven and his music comes as a surprise. His book is full of unexpected insights and makes sense of the sometimes bewildering contrast between the music and the man.” –Alexander Chancellor, The Guardian, 16 March 2007.
“Morris has the ability to impart genuine aesthetic and technical information to his audience without devolving into jargon.... The works that give Beethoven his ‘universal status’ ... deserve a critic with the vast reserves of feeling, fancy, and intelligence that Morris brings to the task.” –Tim Page, The Washington Post, 18 December 2005.
“In the main, Mr. Morris succeeds in the tricky balancing act of engaging the full range of musical readers.... But there are moments, I confess, when is boring, when the music lover/biographer is both too technical and too impressionistic at the same time.” –Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun, 28 September 2005.
Colonel Roosevelt
“With Colonel Roosevelt, magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has every reason to feel immensely proud.” --Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“The eternally restless Roosevelt, who always wanted to be ‘in the arena,’ makes the third volume of Edmund Morris’s epic biography as entertaining and energetic as its predecessors.... And, as before, Morris builds his story around some marvelous set pieces.... It is probably impossible to write a bad book about Theodore Roosevelt. Morris has written a great one.” --John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times
This Living Hand
“ writes with originality and surprise every time, whether about presidents (not just Roosevelt and Reagan, but also Jefferson, Madison, Clinton, Obama), Nadine Gordimer, his wife, classical music (he is a man possessed by Beethoven), or the art of biography.... The collection’s first entry and earliest piece, “The Bumstitch,” a lament for the rarest of fruits ... is, to me, the best. It is effortless, hasty, tasty, autobiographical, strange, surprising, twisting, graceful, rich, beautiful, haunting, and devastating.” –Jimmy So, The Daily Beast, 22 October 2012
Read more about this topic: Edmund Morris (writer)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)