Summer Book Club: Roosevelt’s Rough Riders

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Rough Riders, by Mark Lee Gardner

ROUGH RIDERS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT, HIS COWBOY REGIMENT, AND THE IMMORTAL CHARGE UP SAN JUAN HILL, by Mark Lee Gardner

Continuing a summer of adventure reading, here’s the swaggering story of larger-than-life
Theodore Roosevelt, written in narrative style and as much of a page-turner as any novel you’ll pick up this summer. We love our narrative nonfiction. Could it be that Donald Trump is really the modern day version of Teddy Roosevelt, but with cufflinks?

Right after the USS Maine went down in the Havana Harbor in 1898, President McKinley threw together a few cigar-chomping cowboys and cavaliers to drive Spain out of Cuba.

That was the birth of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, a regiment of western cattle drivers, rag-tag adventurers, and Ivy-elite reprobates, whose famed Battle of San Juan Hill immortalized them and made Roosevelt a legend.

A side story is the relationship between the Rough Riders and the Buffalo Soldiers who fought alongside them at San Juan Hill.

Gardner brought in obscure diaries from private collections in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Found at Amazon for $15.99 hardback, Prime.

Read on.