redrobinbookreviews

The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898   Evan Thomas
Informative, well-written, and useful history of the push to continue American expansion beyond our borders once the frontier was closed. Really enjoyed the focus on the people and not just what they did. William James turns out to be a hero, to me, by not being swept along. Teddy Roosevelt, notwithstanding his later reformist work, was an egotistical, malevolent jerk. Unsurprisingly, Hearst was an evil, unfeeling manipulator. Learned a lot. Good bridge into the twentieth, American, century.