In Brief
- Performance: Mark Deakins takes all twenty-six hours and thirty-six minutes, and nobody else appears in the credit.
- What it covers: American political biography, relentless ambition, the making of a president, the 1800s in close detail
- Feel: Dense but readable, built for a long haul
- Our call: The audio edition solves the page count that has defeated readers in print, and the volume stops before the presidency.
The description on this listing runs to three sentences. The last of them announces a publication date of September 14th, 2001, timed to mark the centenary of Roosevelt reaching the presidency. That is jacket copy for a hardback anniversary edition, still attached to an audiobook released in June 2010 and still speaking in the present tense about a milestone almost a quarter of a century old. Twenty-six hours and thirty-six minutes of Edmund Morris sit behind it, and the page in front of that recording is telling you about a book launch instead.
Every One of Those Things by Forty-Two
Harvard graduate, historian, New York state assemblyman, rancher, Civil Service Commissioner, New York City Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, commanding officer of the Rough Riders, war hero, Governor of New York, Vice President, President. A reviewer signing as Mike Powers lists all of it and then adds the detail that makes the biography work: Roosevelt had done every one of those things by the age of forty-two. This first volume is the story of that accumulation, and the reason it needs twenty-six hours is that no single one of those jobs can be skipped without breaking the sequence.
Morris writes it without making a reader fight for it. The 2015 response on this page puts the quality plainly: a very well-written book, long but easy going, an author who does not burden the reader with ponderous questions. The same reviewer is delighted to find Roosevelt described as a dude in period sources and surprised the word existed then, which is a small thing and a good sign. A biography that produces that kind of note in a reader is doing narrative work. It is not reciting a file. Twenty-six hours in one voice will expose a dull writer very quickly, and nothing among these responses suggests that risk applies here.
Deakins Turns Length Into the Format's Argument
Mark Deakins carries the entire twenty-six hours and thirty-six minutes, and the length is the argument for the format. This is a book that two separate reviewers describe in the hundreds and thousands of pages, a genuine deterrent in print and a non-issue in audio. Twenty-six hours across a month of commuting and dog walks is achievable in a way that a doorstop on a nightstand often is not, and long-form biography rewards a steady reader more than almost any other nonfiction category. The trade is that you cannot flip back to check a name, and this book carries a great many of them, a dozen titles attached to Roosevelt alone before he reached forty-two and a supporting cast assembled from four decades of public life.
How far this volume goes is worth knowing before you start. The record files it as book one in a Theodore Roosevelt series, and a 2025 reviewer confirms the shape from the inside, calling it volume one of three and warning that it is quite an investment. The same response wishes for more depth on the governorship and admits there may be little to say about the vice presidency, which tells you where the emphasis falls: this is the ascent, and the presidency itself belongs to a later book.
Twenty-six hours is a long way to travel on a stranger's recommendation, so the credentials in the description are worth taking seriously. The Modern Library selected it as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of all time, and the Chicago Tribune called it a classic. Those are the two strongest claims here, and they carry considerably more weight than a badge assembled from three votes. They are also, notably, the only two pieces of evaluation on this listing that were written by anyone with a professional obligation to have read the thing.
A Five-Star Response That Never Mentions Roosevelt
Page counts are the running theme in this column, and the two reviewers who supply one do not agree. The 2015 entry says the book runs seven hundred and seventy pages or more. The 2025 entry says about a thousand. Both are describing a printed edition, neither figure applies to what you would be downloading, and the gap between them is wide enough that a listener shopping on length gets no usable answer from either. The runtime is the only measurement here that means anything.
A five-star response titled simply Excellent spends its visible length on an entirely different subject: a wave of books on stoicism, and two authors it names as examples of the trend. Roosevelt does not appear in the portion available to read. Separately, the entry posted from Brazil is written in Portuguese and credits the compilation to Edward Norris, which is not the name in the author field of this record. Both responses are enthusiastic. Neither is much use as evidence about this recording, and one of them attributes the work to somebody else entirely.
Two more things to hold lightly. The rating counter reports three votes while five signed responses are visible, so those two figures are plainly not counting the same population, and a 4.7 across three whole-star votes only resolves under one rounding convention, which means no arithmetic claim about it is worth making. The oldest response carries the date March 2002, more than eight years ahead of this audio edition, which means at least one enthusiastic voice here belongs to somebody who could not possibly have heard Deakins read a word of it.
Wrong Choice If You Want the Presidency
History listeners with a long commute and an appetite for a full life told properly are the natural audience, and anyone who has bounced off this book in print should treat the audio edition as a genuine second chance. Readers who like American political biography built out of documents and scenes instead of argument will get a great deal here. Anyone planning to continue into the later volumes should start with this one, since the record and a reviewer agree it comes first.
Wrong choice for a listener who wants the presidency, because that is not this book. Wrong choice too for anyone who needs a compact overview, or who cannot commit to a single narrator for the better part of a month. Twenty-six hours with Morris is a serious undertaking, and the column beneath the recording does almost nothing to help you decide on it.
Common Questions
Is the audiobook abridged, given the page counts reviewers cite?
Nothing on the record indicates any abridgement. Two reviewers estimate the printed book at seven hundred and seventy pages and roughly a thousand respectively, and the recording runs twenty-six hours and thirty-six minutes, a plausible unabridged length for a work of that size. The listing itself never addresses the question.
Should the reviews on this audiobook page worry me?
They should be read with care, though not dismissed. One five-star response never mentions Roosevelt at all, another credits a different author's name, a third dates from 2002 and cannot refer to this recording. The praise is real, and almost none of it is evidence about the audio edition specifically.
